After 13 years as a commercially available technology, CTP has become one of the most mature systems in the entire plate-based print industry. The gadgetry is proven, the market need has been established and the business case pretty much settled. As a result, the big risks - and the big bucks, as far as the platesetter manufacturers are concerned - are no longer there. Since Drupa 95, when the technology received its first shippable showing, 95% of the market has progressed to its second or third replacement cycle and new customers are few and far between. Such market conditions have informed the decision of Agfa, which announced, late last year, that it would exit the platesetter market to focus on its consumables business, partnering instead with original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to provide hardware.

　　The slowdown in the investment cycle also means buyers are now looking for different features than they were first time round. John O’Rourke, Presstek’s worldwide product manager for CTP, explains: If you look at a small print shop investing in CTP for the first time, maybe 10 years ago, it was perfectly acceptable to have an entirely manual machine with no autoloading or online processor, because from film planning and hand platemaking they still had resources they could use to carry plates around. By ‘resources’, O’Rourke means ‘people’ C an attribute in noticeably short supply in the leaner world of 2008. In second-generation CTP investment cycles, that resource is no longer there, he says, so there’s a need for a higher level of automation because even if the imaging speed is the same, the staffing is different. Presstek has embodied its vision into the Compass range of platesetters, launched at Drupa and due to ship later this year.

　　Replacing old with new

　　The Compasses are thermal platesetters, imaging aluminium plates in the four-up and eight-up formats. They are likely to replace Presstek’s Dimension B2 and B1 machines C the eight-up version which has been around for nearly a decade and, by O’Rourke’s own admission, is looking frankly a little long in the tooth.

　　Understanding the Compass platesetters and their place in the CTP world takes a little backtracking over Presstek’s history, in particular its tied marketing strategy for plates and platesetters. Until recently, the corporation’s plates have been dependent on its CTP devices C so a customer had to buy a Presstek platesetter to image a Presstek plate.

　　The dual deal meant that the lifetime of the equipment became effectively the lifetime of the deal. We’d have to wait until our customers’ equipment aged out before we could sell to them again with new products maybe more appropriate to their needs, says O’Rourke. This meant we were missing market opportunities and not delivering against customer needs.

　　But at Drupa, Presstek launched the Aurora Pro, a thermal non-ablative plate certified to work with both Screen and Kodak platesetters, as well as Presstek’s own newly launched Compass. The vast majority of the installed base of thermal platesetters worldwide is under the two brands of Kodak and Screen, adds O’Rourke.

　　A more open platform

　　The Compass, then, is one half of Presstek’s own bid for an open platform: it will image both Aurora Pro plates and those of other manufacturers, while the Aurora Pro itself represents a similar lateral expansion within the corporation’s plate strategy. It is what O’Rourke calls an opening move in the future expansion of the plate portfolio, aimed at delivering chemistry-free solutions to a wider market than Presstek has previously been able to address.

　　Widening out Presstek’s traditional markets is a strategically desirable, perhaps essential, development at this point in the corporation’s history. Its most established, and by far its most loyal, user-base is in the 10-employees-and-under bracket C precisely the bracket that, in the global credit crunch, is being squeezed, merged, consolidated and bankrupted at a frightening rate. When O’Rourke talks about delivering solutions in the 29-40 and 100-plus employees segments, he may also be talking about a bid for corporate survival: shifting Presstek’s customer base into a safer and more stable segment of the market. But it’s true that one of our goals is also to offer the customer a choice beyond the big three, he insists. There’s now a world-class plates-plus-hardware solution that’s available from a company that’s not Kodak, Fuji or Agfa.

　　Interestingly, the Aurora Pro plate is Presstek’s first non-ablative thermal technology. O’Rourke says the corporation has shifted its focus, not on account of any shortcoming of the ablative system, but because the key for Aurora Pro was to deliver a plate that worked at very low energies, and ablative demands a high-power thermal laser. The balance of the world’s installed base of platesetters, he says, use lower-powered lasers that can image thirstier plates, but at a slower rate to compensate for the lack of firepower. The Aurora Pro has a range of coating sensitivities, but overall is addressable by a laser outputting just 150 millijoules per square centimetre (mj/cm2) of thermal energy and, says O’Rourke, this gives us a target base of a wide range of installed equipment across the world that we can help to run at top speeds.

　　The Aurora Pro’s range of coating sensitivities is also responsible for a high potential throughput on the Compass range, as O’Rourke explains: Each Aurora Pro plate indicates the throughput and total output speed of the device it needs to run on. Higher energy requirements mean you have to slow down the device. Some of the chemistry-free plates that are currently available on the market require something like 300mj/cm2 and that requires some devices to slow down by 50%. But, working at 150mj/cm2, we can deliver a full-speed throughput on our own and on other manufacturers’ platesetters.

　　Environmental consideration

　　Chemistry-free is an important platform for Presstek, given its commitment to on- and off-press chemistry-free technologies. All the benefits of chemistry-free are well known, O’Rourke says, particularly twinned with our debris-free plate coating technology.

　　The Aurora Pro can’t be baked C or rather, it can, but there is little or no need to C but even in its unbaked state it can withstand the high aggressions of UV chemistry, giving it an unusual market advantage. It has a higher solvent resistance than any other plate on the market and it delivers superbly on both conventional and UV, says O’Rourke.

　　There are two each of the B1 and the B2 formats within the Compass range: a 22pph and a 30pph model in the B1 bracket and a 15pph and a 38pph model in B2. They are not upgradeable, though O’Rourke says the ability might be designed in at some point. Clearly, though, it’s not a priority.

　　However, in line with Presstek’s strategy of upping automation to compensate for leaner staff-to-kit ratios in a modern print operation, the Compasses are fully automated. They carry a wide choice of options: a single cassette to manage a single size of plate and fully automate the removal of interleaving; inline punching and transport via bridge to a plate washer; and a multi-cassette unit handling three or four different plate sizes.

　　The Compasses can be driven by all Presstek’s workflows, including the entry-level Momentum Pro and the new Latitude PDF/JDF workflow, due for launch at this year’s GraphExpo, which runs from 26-29 October. Powered by EskoArtwork, Presstek’s newest workflow includes a native PDF editing application known as Neo. This works with multi-page PDFs for last-minute corrections. In addition,
the Compasses can link, via workflows, to Presstek’s Press-sense-driven web-to-print package Pathway. Screening for both Latitude and Momentum Pro includes FM options, either via Harlequin’s Dispersed Screening or Presstek’s proprietary Paragon, Organic or Concentric screening.

　　O’Rourke is excited about his company’s revamp of the platesetter portfolio. The new hardware, coupled with the plate, allows us to compete on a level playing field, both in terms of our format sizes and also in terms of our productivity levels. We look forward to being at the table for some bigger companies’ investment decisions.