Laser Printer Plate Making Issues

I am recently back in the printing industry after a four year absence and am trying to work with laser plates. I am having the hardest time with getting halftones to print correctly and for the life of me can't grasp how to get the dots to print so that our press operator won't have a hard time with plugging them up. If someone could point me in the direction of where to go about reading how to set up these files and print them properly, I would be sooooo very grateful.

We currently use Adobe CS5 usually Indd, AI, or PDF and we are printing on laser plates on an HP5000. They are then being printed on AB Dick 9810.

Thanks in advance!

 

Laser plates can be tricky when first using them. Pending on the image you are trying to print you can try a few different things. Try running a lower line screen. If you are imaging the plate at say 133 try 120 or 110. Also, can't think of the names off the top of my head but most laser plate companies sell a plate cleaner similar to an etch that you apply before putting the plate on press which helps clean the plate and helps it run cleaner. We only use our laser plates for medium to low quality work, or if it is just type, if you need a high quality output you are always best off sticking with film and metal plates, unless you have direct imaging capabilities to metal plates

 

We are finding that the toner is flaking off. Does the 'etch' work to keep the toner on the plate or is that a printer issue? Also, when I try to adjust the line screens in the print dialog box, the results do not seem to change. I'm wondering if that means there is a problem with me or the printer. I would love to get the owner to go direct to plate, but that's going to be a hard sell because of the costs.

Thanks so much.

 

Eh, pending on the size of your company, direct to plate can be a waste of money. I have seen way to many printing companies go out of business because they invested a ton of money in prepress, just so they could say they have the newest technology, only to realize that it wasn't making them money, and the notes on the equipment killed them.

As far as the flaking, t sounds like you have a fuser roller issue. What machine are you using to output the plates. I have a xante platemaker. Not familiar with other machines but that is what I am guessing the problem is. If the dots aren't changing, and you are having flaking issues, to me it sounds like the computer or your rip isn't talking to the output device correctly, it's not telling it what the fuser roller temperature should be or the line screen. It also could be the plates themselves. What types of plates are you using?

 

It probably would be a waste for such a small company. It would just be nice to have plates easily instead of the outdated camera they use currently.

We are printing from PC to HP5000. The printer is at least 9 years old, so it could be the issue. Are there even any technicians that can work on them anymore? The plates are by Base-Line. The owner was sold the plates from a paper distributor, so there isn't much tech help. I guess I need to look into having the printer looked at, but I think we also need help setting up the driver correctly. Unless I am misunderstanding you?

 

I'm not 100% percent sure, since I haven't used that particular machine, but it could be the drivers and it could be the plates. I hate baselines personally, but I know some poeple that like them, no idea what they like them but they do . I would check out hurst chemical http://www.hurstchemical.com/. They might sell plates made for your machine. I don't use any other plates but theirs. And Ive been through baseline, xante, generics, etc. Never had a problem with these. The image never flakes off, screens look good. They are a bit more expensive but what costs more, a few dollars for good plates or paying a pressmen 4 hours extra to get a job done. Try giving them a call, they might be able to help. They have pretty good tech support as well.

 

I will definitely check into them. Thanks so much!

 

We had loads of problems when we were imaging laser plates on an HP5000. They will work but you will have to pass them through the printer a couple more times on a blank page print to fuse the toner to plate hard enough. We then had the problem that the extra passes through the printer to stop the flaking caused some backgrounding marks. We now run our laser plates out on our Xerox DC250 using the greyscale setting and all our problems have gone away. Much better print quality and the toner fuses well enough on one pass to get 25,000 impressions easily on the press. We have also had good results using OKI colour machines to image the plates, but I think your problem really is the HP5000 is only really good enough for basic text work on these plates.

 

CopyCatJeni,

We use the same process as you.
1. Make sure you double fuse the plate
2.make sure you buy and use the plate etch that the company sells for those plates.
3. Also run the fountain solution a little stronger.
4. use the postscript driver for the printer not the pcl (?) driver

we use our on a HP 5100 and it works great even on screens. Nothing that would beat a metal CTP plate, but is good enough for almost all our work.

 

We recently have been doing all spot colour work on our DI press.

However we used to use xante myriad 2 polyester plates with reasonable sucess as mentioned above your printer will not sufficiently fuse the toner to the plate in one pass, we had a dedicated "plate baker" which we placed the plates in for a few minutes after they had been printed. This significantly increased the longevity of the plates.

If you cannot get your printer to print the dot you could try adding a dot to your artwork. We used to do this in photoshop by doing the following
- Image mode greyscale
- Image mode BITMAP
- Choosing the DPI of your printer (we selected 600DPI as we didn't want our artwork to be enlarged or reduced in size after we created it) and selected HALFTONE
- We then selected 133lpi as this is the screen our printer could reproduce and I always selected an ellipse shape dot.

Using the above method we produced reasonably good screens.

However eventually we bought a second hand rebranded Eskofot silvermaster platemaker (camera not CTP) but I cannot stress enough the difference this made, the polyester silvermaster plates seemed to last forever and our punched holes no longer stretched!!! they can be picked up very cheap and are a great alternative

Andy

 

It definitely sounds like the toner is not getting fused to the plate correctly. You may want to contact http://hp5000platemakers.com/ as they do work specifically with the 5000. I run Hurst SmartIO through an Okidata 9650 with good results. Always make sure to prep the plate afterwards to prevent toning.

 

Do yourselves a favour, get metal posi plates, a vacuum fram and print on the plate as you already do, but then expose them, develop them by hand and hey presto, you've got proper metal plates.

 

agreed, or just use the laser printer to print onto film, as a posi for the metal plates