What CTP system to buy?

We currently run a Mitsubishi SDP ECO platemaker, running around 2000-2500 plates per month with punching offline. Its a polyester system and i'm looking to move up to a metal system with inline punching.

We looked at the Heidleberg system, but before we go for the final order i wanted to hear anyones reccomendations.

We're looking for a very high Ipi on the system ideally, and must have online punching. We run a B3 set-up with about 99% of all plate being for an SRA3 sheet. All plates to run on Shinohara 52 presses.

Thanks in advance

Tim

 

We use a Screen CTP and don't have any problems. Check Fuji also its pretty much the same machine.

They can set it up with a punch on the CTP to your press.
We tested the Mitsubishi plates and couldn't get them to fit on press.

The other cost is what software to buy to run the CTP.

 

What size plate are you making? Metal isn't always the best solution unless you're plating something wider than 36" or so or you're doing extremely long runs. If you're looking to make the move to metal because of quality you should look into a polyester plate maker with an internal drum like a DPX or a DPX4 with internal punching. Cost per plate will be less than half of what metal will be - not to mention the time it takes to make 4 plates.

Polyester also has the environmental benefits associated with it. The carbon released just in manufacturing and transporting metal plates before they arrive at your shop is something like 5 times that of polyester.

 

What about the recycling factor? You can't (to my knowledge) recycle Polyester but with aluminium you can actually get a payback for the scrap plates, they can be resmelted for other uses.

As for transportation don't Polyester plates need to be transported or do they materialise by magic?

In any case the carbon footprint is miniscule compared to say just jumping in your car and going to and from work.

 

Well you bring up some good points, but as long as you're asking I'll offer what I can. First of all polyester is recyclable, its a fibrous material and much like paper they turn it into a slurry and remake it into new product using the same fibers. Is it AS recyclable as aluminum? no, but scrapping your aluminum plates brings you next to nothing other than knowing you're not harming the environment. Bottom line? Yes poly is recyclable.

As for the carbon coming from your ride to the office outweighing the carbon coming from the production and transportation of your supplies. Well, thats a rather weak argument. Regardless of what it compares to, no matter how much your saving when it comes to environmental issues its always worth doing. Second, lets say you do 3 jobs a day, thats 12 plates a day. After a few months you've racked up a good number of plates and a good number of transportation costs. Much more than you would with poly.

So as long as we're talking environmental, lets talk about printing as a whole. Plates alone are a pretty minor impact on the environment when you take into account all of the other things a print shop does. If you want a plate with some environmental savings look up a company called Toray. They make a plate for use in waterless printing. Without water in the press you save on alcohol substitutes and dampening solutions, plus reduced waste from the operator not having to deal ink/water balance.

I hope I don't seem biased. I sell it all.

 

I bow to your greater knowledge on the Polyester front, my ignorance on this issue is clear.

But as for ally plates, there is a financial payback for the scrap - in addition to which they aren't they more reuseable than Polyester? By which I mean, once used for a job, they can be gummed, stored then reused when that job comes in again - can Poly plates do that?

Also what about the dot quality - can they hold as fine a screen as ally?

Also are they as dimensionally stable as ally - aren't they prone to stretch?

As for environmental savings using Toray - well you can try, but the increased costs of the inks/plates as well as the operational difficulties (from our trials - huge amounts of tack on initial startups) aren't going to generate much support from the client base I know. (Hell, they won't even pay for a recycled grade of paper...but don't get me started on that one!)

In the main, I reserve the right to remain somewhat cynical regarding the 'environmental' benefits of recycling and earth friendly products.

Show me a product that doesn't have a detrimental impact on the 'environment' and is less expensive than its evil, planet killing counterpart and maybe I'll begin to believe that it's not all part of marketing strategy.

I hope that I don't sound skeptical - belay that, yes I am skeptical

 

Skepticism is typical. It sounds as though you're simply touting metal as the end all be all. I'd like to make the point that polyester certainly has its place in the industry. In terms of short-run quick setup work polyester has numerous advantages including lower cost and quicker processing that make it far more financially viable in that market. If we're talking 40" presses, that's a different story.

Onto your points, financial payback for scrap. Scrap metal does have a financial return when scrapped. Aluminum is prize metal, but cost per pound doesn't bring it close to the cost per plate of polyester even when taking the scrap payback into account. With poly we're talking about $3 per plate. At $5-7 per aluminum plate. Aluminum is far heavier than polyester and thus the transportation costs to get the plate from the mill where it's made to your back door are higher. Not to mention the machinery at the mill itself has to be much heavier and more expensive. Bottom line is that metal plates are more expensive to use than polyester plates.

Reusability? Here's your advantage, an aluminum plate can be tossed into a drawer and pulled out months later and be used as though it were brand new. This simply doesn't work with poly, they're one-time use. But let's be realistic, what percentage of your jobs are true reprints where you can be using the exact same plates as you used 6 months ago? Very few. And at such a lower cost per plate, its cheaper to replate the job from your archive than to warehouse plates for jobs that you might redo.

Dot quality? This is a hot topic; aluminum is easily capable of 200 line screen quality, whereas with polyester you're starting to push the medium at 200 lpi, most accounts I deal with don't push their poly beyond 175. Nowadays with stochastic screening methods you can overcome this and the quality to the naked eye is identical regardless of the plate. Manufacturers on both sides will certainly tell you otherwise but I don't care how experienced you are - you simply can't walk up to a printed sheet and know what kind of plate was used to print it without pullout out your 25x loupe.

Plate stretch? Yes, poly is prone to stretching when improperly used. All modern presses have automatic plate loading systems that eliminate this problem alltogether. Not to say there aren't limitations to the medium, there are. When you start getting into sizes over 29" the plates are so wide that stretch, skew, and other fit problems are rampant. At those sizes and above you are absolutely better off going with metal plates.

In the end, it all comes down to what kind of presses you'll be plating, what type of customer you're catering to, and what kind of environmental impact you're comfortable with having - which no matter which way you go, you will still impact the environment in some way.

Onto waterless, you tried running it? We had an expo here at the office running Toray plates on our showfloor 26" Sakurai without chillers. We had to keep our run lengths below 150 sheets or so to keep heat from building up in the press. We had zero issues, it worked great. Waterless has been around for years now but it's certainly becoming more viable due to improvements in the plates, ink, and presses. I'd imagine you had your experiences with some early products and I bet you'd have a much better experience nowadays.

 

Skeptical here again... $3 a plate? That's expensive, I pay around £3.12gbp per ally plate (560 x 670mm) and I'm not a big user.

As for reuse - depends on your client base, we regularly reuse plates 4 or 5 times on 25,000 sheets runs.

Precisely...you can be as much of a tree hugger as you like - the end product will still have some 'supposed' detrimental effect.

Here's a better plan, let's all switch the lights off, go home and wait for death rather than 'damage the environment' - and if you opt for cremation, heaven help you!

OK, so calm down, I hear what you say about poly plates, in a nutshell they're fine for short to med length runs on relatively undemanding work on smaller, auto-plate equipped presses. One wonders about the energy expended in the recycling process but hey since I don't subscribe to their use I guess it's not my problem.

150 sheets? Come on, 150 sheets isn't even close to a useful demo, no wonder you didn't have issues - they didn't have time to surface!

Having said that I had high hopes for waterless when we trialed it in the '80's - one thing we do agree on - you need a press equipped with roller cooling for it at the outset. Since we run Komori 626 we could go that way - just depends how much the technology has changed since then and whether it's financially viable.

 

£3.12 is about $5. Exactly what I estimated. We have a customer nearby using a 670mm polyester plate for run lengths like that. Sounds to me like you've tried the stuff long ago and never thought to give it another chance after decades of the tech maturing.

I could be called newschool, but I think this stuff works just fine and most of what I run into is people who tried it long long ago and won't give it another look because they're "experts."

decreasing your impact is desirable and pretty easy to do.

We're just having a discussion. You wonder about energy expended during recycling? The expended energy is nothing compared to the energy expended mining more aluminum.

Don't discount the power of a 150 sheet demo. We were showing how efficient the technology is and that you can be at pleasing color after 5 sheets. The plates and press would have worked perfectly for 40,000 impressions had we fronted the thousands of dollars to install chilling units in the press. That's not really an option since the press isn't sold and might go somewhere and run conventional plates. The demo accomplished exactly what it was supposed to do - display the viability of the technology. I hope you aren't still harboring thoughts on what the tech was like in the 80's. We're talking two decades ago in the printing industry which might as well be a century. Sounds like you've gotten a bit stale with age and think you know all there is to know about the tech because you saw it years and years ago. Things change my friend and when you're looking to make a purchase you need to revisit every avenue and make an informed decision.

 

I hear what you say. Maybe I have gotten stale, I put it down to the sales hype surrounding 'new' whizbang technology which always ends up costing you more than you save.

You want to talk super high tech inks? How about process inks that set just as well on matt/silk coated as on gloss, stays overnight fresh in the duct and don't require UV to cure fully inside an hour? Got one of those on the shelf? Nope - didn't think so.

Or maybe a coated art paper that takes an overall solid and can be folded without cracking? Got one of those?

150 sheet demos are just that, demos - your potential, troublefree 40k run is merely theoretical, unless you are saying that your feeder never trips out and that subsequent startups are not subject to any kind of colour variance.

Yes, clearly, some things change but, if you subscribe to that logic, some things do not.

 

Heidelberg Prosetter for the CTP and solids are 100%, and the Glunz and Jensen Raptor Pro S for processing, maybe they are better combos out there but it works for me. You have to use chemistry such as developer and finisher but when we started out on a budget we found a good deal from Billy in Gloustershire who sells these gizmo's.

 

Pre-press express, are the guys to buy from.

 

Consistancy wise from plate to plate,you cannot beat Screen/Fuji systems,by far the best plates out there.We have the daddy of them Platerite Ultima 24000S and it's superb,has online punching and a good plate processor

 

Well, for what it's worth, I'd go metal CTP is I could. Why? Because I have had a few problems with poly plates. They're fine for short run and spot colour work, give excellent halftones and gradients (seriously, i replaced an Agfa Accuset imagesetter for a DPX) but they are way more prone to stretching and damage. I also found I had to run the press wetter than with metal plates, which caused knock-on problems with some coated papers sticking to blankets, setting-off etc. We ran a GTOZ with poly plates and it was a case of getting one colour to stretch to fit the other by tightening the plate clamp for each job. The GTO was only 4 years old with sub-10mil on the clock and was well maintained, so I'm sure it wasn't the press. The plates also had problems with conventional dampening when running fast. We ended up replacing it with Varn units after trying a chiller/filter/recirculator to no avail.

Still, compared to making film with an imagesetter, developing it, assembling it on foils for plating and finally hand-developing the plates and hanging them out to dry, it was much more productive and the quality was comparable. We ran 150dpi screens on every job. Could have gone higher but saw little point as nobody ever complained the our halftones were coarse.

If the majority of your printing is CMYK, then I'd say it's a no-brainer to go for metal CTP. If, as in my case, it's a broad spectrum of work with all kinds of spot colours, all kinds of stocks and all kinds of run lengths, then I'd suggest poly plates are worth a look because they are cheaper and invariably much quicker. If I do a 100,000 run, I'll make 3 plates before I start ... after all, they're punched and press-ready so as soon as I detect a break-up, I change the plate, run a few sheets back through to check position and adjust to match the previous plate (if required) and then it's ready to go again.

 

Wow to your cornes gentlemen, can i ask a question? Who takes ploy plates in for recycling, I haven't found anyone in Canada. They go straight to the landfill. Metal is paying $.42 under 2000 lbs., and over is $.65 a lbs.

 

Yeah i want to...but what will be the price...cremation

 

personally if it was me id go for metal over poly every day. sure poly maybe cheaper if your using that amount of plates.. But in my experience if printing full colour work, you cant use poly plates. and then to save money on the run of the mill jobs youll have to buy a poly platesetter????
Why buy 2 when 1 metal platesetter can do it all..