Fuji LHP-J plate blinding problem

[chevalier]

Has anyone confirmed that there hasn't been some kind of EPA regulation change that the fountain solution vendors have silently changed their formulas to remove some kind of new banned substance? I recall this happening a while back and everybody was going mad pulling at straws only to find out that all of the vendors had made a change as required by law but didn't bother to tell anyone.

We use LHPJ plates with Boettcher fountain solution and have quite a high volume of plates always medium-to-long runs and have not had any issues. It could be that we either haven't gone through our inventory and used newer plates or newer fountain solution. We order both at least once a month.

[John Arneson]

Chevalier,
How long are your runs?

[chevalier]

I work for a packaging company. We mainly print only on SBS board but also some CCNB and recycled as well. The rare small run for us is ~5000 sheets and our typical run is somewhere between 20k - 100k sheets. At least once a month we have multiple runs longer runs longer than 250k sheets as well. We do have issues time to time with certain metallic inks eating image off of the plates but we have never had blinding issues like those mentioned.

Other notes:
We only use distilled water in our plate processor chemistry (except for cleaning) and are pretty manic about maintaining our plating equipment. As far as the press guys they pretty much use water from the tap and we are also located in a region in the US with insane amounts of of calcium in the water and near absolutely zero iron in it.