Who should run CTP, Prepress or Pressroom?

[zoran]

There was separate thread with interesting tidbits about Pressroom running CTP plates vs Prepress here : Pressmen as Platemakers?.
What is your opinion?

[Alith7]

wanted to qualify my "pressroom only" answer as mainly pressroom does the burning, but prepress helps.

[David Milisock]

In my opinion in a ROOM technology shop let the pressman make the plates.

[BeauchampT]

I suggest that pressmen be involved in the entire platemaking process for several reasons....

In my plant, we are using plate calibration curves, web growth profiles, etc... all being applied to media files from prepress. It is pressroom that knows its needs for press dot gain curve profiles, how the web is growing and so on. If prepress is the one creating the TIFFs for imaging to plate, we have no control over what they decided to do. And it is somewhat...difficult...to have to constantly communicate between two departments. Really, we could make prepress' life easier by taking over the whole platemaking process.

[Cornishpastythighs]

Sorry I have got to disagree, Press guys should stick to running the presses and being the best operators they can be, training their junior press people and managing their crews in a safe and productive manner. Press people need to concentrate 100% of their time on quality and productivity of the press hardware. Making plates to prevent downtime is one thing applying curves and creating files is another, hell I cant even get 2 pressman to agree on the fountain solution dosage without constantly changing it.
my 2 pence worth

[David Milisock]

Sorry I have got to disagree, Press guys should stick to running the presses and being the best operators they can be, training their junior press people and managing their crews in a safe and productive manner. Press people need to concentrate 100% of their time on quality and productivity of the press hardware. Making plates to prevent downtime is one thing applying curves and creating files is another, hell I cant even get 2 pressman to agree on the fountain solution dosage without constantly changing it.
my 2 pence worth

I am not for the pressmen screwing with curves, this is within the domain of the calibration which is very time consuming and therefore expensive.

I have no problem with pressmen making plates in a ROOM t4chnology environment, which means point and click for them.

[Lukas Engqvist]

Imaging plates is not the same as setting up workflow etc. It is good if pressman knows how to re-image a plate if he crashes it.

[Cornishpastythighs]

Our pressmen have enough to do on the press, we trained all of our press feeders and helpers how to point and click to make plates on the off shifts.

[Happyprinter]

In this economy with our shop size significantly downsized, we have trained our prepress and press people to run our CTP. That is, our press people can take a file already prepared by graphics, then drag it to the proper place on our RIP and load a plate. It's nice when our graphics dept. is busy and the press dept. is waiting on plates to have the pressman be able to burn plates. As a rule our graphics dept. handles that but in a pinch both departments can do it. I believe to survive and stay lean in this market you have to utilize and cross train everyone in as many departments as possible. This is a practice that we have instituted for over 25 years and it has not hurt nor hindered our operations yet. My humble opinion.

[herbert]

The Pressmen should be concentrating on making the presses run as efficiently. as possible, Remember these are the money makers. I agree they should be able to run plates if they crash in case it happens on a early . late shift, with no prepress guys around.