Re: Anyone use a Xante Laser Platemaker 5?
Dustin,
I'm not familiar with the Argyle Camera so I can't give you a comparison to your situation. I can, however, compare them to plate and negs because we have an ECRM Mako imagesetter for film then strip and burn to metal plate. We have also been using laser plates for years with a HP5000N that finally could not image laser plates anymore.
For line art (black and white, no grayscales) the Platemaker 5 is great; we've run about forty plates since we installed it and every plate has worked very well. Only two plates were unusable for line art and both were operator error and not the plates causing the problems.
We've run the Myriad plates sold by Xante and the Hurst plates as well and both work without any issues. As for the plate price the Myriad plates for the Xante are cheaper but you can only image one side. The Hurst cost more but you can image both sides of the plate. Not that you'll be able to image and run both sides of the plate, the second side ALWAYS gets ruined on press. The advantage of the second side imaging is more in the prepress, where if you make a bad image (typo, position, etc.) you can still image the second side and use the plate. With the Myriad plates a mistake at prepress makes the plate trash, period. I have not decided which plate to use; my final decision will based on how much we screw up in prepress, but I'm leaning towards the Myriad plates.
Now as for grayscales, that's another story. Grayscales print OK, not great, but not bad either. photos on uncoated stocks at 133 lpi do great, but not as great on coated stocks, even at 150 lpi; they aren't bad though just a little darker than plate and neg. Where I see the biggest draw back with any toner based imaging device is in screens and the Xante so far has been no exception. Screens really suffer with these machines: they start to deteriorate over the press run and and at some spots quicker than other spots; another issue is text within the screens where the screens of the inside of the bowls of letters like the "O" disappear even on uncoated stocks.
To be fair I just installed the Platemaker 5 less then two weeks ago and I plan to talk to Xante's support to see if they have any suggestions. I have found Xante's phone install to be helpful and every person I've talked to has been very courteous and helpful beyond what I expected from Xante and I was very pleased. I did however purchase the 3 year warranty. The reason is that thick stocks beat up laser printers like I experienced with my HP5000N; the Xante is made to image plate material first but I still felt better with 3 years total support on the Platemaker 5 and this would hold Xante more accountable for its product as well.
I purchased the Xante to do the lower quality, less critical jobs cheaply without having to deal with chemicals. For great looking screens we have the imagesetter, so we're able to use the best imaging plate for the type of job required. Should you not have an imagesetter you'll need a source for negs to provide the better and more consistent quality of the neg to metal plates. We also buy out metal plates from a service bureau that has an Agfa CTP metal device for jobs requiring the best 4 color process reproduction available. We hope to replace the ECRM with a metal CTP device sometime next year.
Finally, depending on the client and job we will use the appropriate plate.
Hope that helps,
JaimeZ
Edited by: Jaime Zuniga on Oct 1, 2007 9:02 PM