Re: Presstek 34DI
Hi Banjoman,
It all depends on what you expect. If you think you are getting the answer to every printers dreams, then you will be disapointed. Mechanically it seems quite sound, heavy frame, excellent gripper layout, big impression cylinder.
There are not enough ink rollers so striping can be a problem but we have learned to live with that. Our troubles might be an isolated incident or a 'friday afternoon' machine. They are **VERY** temperature sensitive, dont believe otherwise. our range is 21-22C and thats it. They put out a LOT of heat (we have the IR dryer).
The Ptek engineers in england can tend to be a bit 'we know best' in their attitude, even though the customer may have been printing all his life, this can be annoying. Plate lif has not really been an issue for us, we can easily get 15,000 on a set now that we have fixed the other troubles. You **MUST** follow the maintenance schedule religiously, half hour per day, two hours on a friday, that is if you are on a standard weekday shift.
The best way we have found to obtain maximum colour matching to a proof is to profile the press and use this profile in the rip's colour management. This is a massively complicated area that Ptek know nothing about and i cant go into specifics as i dont do it all myself. Ptek will try and get what they think is reasonable, we needed much more.
Register, well its a portrait machine so expect a little wobble at the back edge. Changeover times, 20 mins, they say 50 sheet makeready, to get to our colour acceptance level can take 500 sheets, i did say that we need extreme colour matching didnt i! But it will get there in the end.
For a small machine it will print good solids although you can expect some colour variation from front to back as the rollers really are too few and too small. Its not terrible though.
Forget the **GREEN** eco friendly sales hype. Using 25kw of aircon all day is definately not green and outweighs any small savings in alcohol or makeready times etc.
Although it is flawed, it does not seem to have much competition.