Three months ago or so I was informed that my plate system was being discontinued!...I was shocked, but somehow knew it was coming!...I was using a Silvermaster SLM BFIII....shoot through the back poly plate you could expose on a vertical camera system...it was old!!!...but it worked good enough for what I was doing....soooo....about 10 years ago I had tried the "Laser Poly Plates" and purchase and HP 5000....I tried for 2 months to get it to work right, but the image would come right off!...I hated it and was mad that it never worked like they claimed!...and of course....It's always the pressman (ME) who doesn't know what he is doing...that’s according to their tech department!....I was very reluctant to even think of buying these plates again or even trying to use the HP 5000…I was looking into the Xante and decided to try their plates from Smart Plate…the plate worked great and I was really impressed!…I just didn’t want to go through buying another laser system and end up with the same results again!…so I kept looking…and was talked back into trying my HP 5000…I too hate my laser printer ( because it didn’t work for plates the first time), but at least own the darn thing and $5000 bucks for an Xante wasn’t real exciting to me!…The lady at “Hurst Chem” gave me 100 plates and the fountain mix and told me to give it a try ( I’m my current Fountain mix not theirs…I do use the Toner Scatter Remover!)…I was still scuffing my feet and sure it wasn’t going to work….I went through and set it up like they told me….you have to have it on the Postscript driver and on card stock…it takes longer to spool in the printer and it goes very slowly through the printer!….your density has to be set to 1…you would think heavier, but the lighter coating of toner allows it to bake better on the plate I guess?…needless to say….It works great for me so far!…I did have a little trouble getting the default set-up on the print driver, but finally have that figured out….I’m almost positive the HP 5100 will produce the same results!…It’s only been 2 months since I have been using this system, but I’m pretty happy with it thus far….also…I got samples from Baseline, Smart Plate and my current one “Hurst Chemicals” and they are all the same plate made in Indonesia!…I don’t care what they say….they all work the same, so shop around!…I guess “smart plate “ won’t tell you how to set up your printer correctly until you buy into their product?….if you need more info, I would be more than glad to send you what was sent to…the plates you will have to get from one of the companies…Oh…the Xante plates look very different (Whiter in color” than the HP plates…you can see that right off the bat!…hope that helps!
