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DIRECT-TO-PLATE imaging may be an interim advance, helping improve and streamline production, but if direct-topress imaging suitable for newspapers arrives tomorrow, there still will be many conventional presses at many papers with many years of useful life left, and all those presses will need printing plates.
Computerized plate exposure is directed by page image data in a prepress system's database, just as an imagesetter puts page files on film the same film ordinarily used to burn plates. The process simply removes the film-exposure stage and outputs plates directly.
Hoped-for benefits include shorter work flow, improved reproduction, labor and consumables savings and fewer disposal concerns. Much depends on plate durability, imaging speed and automation (plate loading, slipsheet removal, online processing). Also to be considered is the difference between the cost of moreexpensive directly imageable plates and the sum of the costs of conventional plates, film and processing chemistry. Affecting the cost comparison is the type of processing needed, if any.
Since early efforts to directly image plates, newspapers have realized the required electronic pagination and/or full-page scans and vendors have developed reasonably fast imagers and plates able to retain acceptable images for long press runs.
But prospective customers still face high equipment costs for full systems (raster image processor, imager, plate-handling automation, processor, etc.), plates that are several times the cost of their conventional counterparts, and a decision on type of plate, which will usually affect the choice of imager and the working environment (darkroom/daylight loading, manual/ automatic, flatbed/drum, post-exposure processing).
Except for three major metros testing Western Lithotech's big machine, U.S. dailies using CTP are mid-sized dailies. In addition to two early adopters of Cymbolic Sciences' imager, Howard Newspapers is testing Gerber platesetters for possible use chainwide, the Billings Gazette has run PrePress Solutions' machine for over a year and an eastern daily is expected to buy a CTP device within weeks.
Provided certain refinements...