Pressman Needs Ideas

[wilson]

Hello everyone,

just signed up today, this web site is very informational. I have been a pressman for 22yrs. I worked at other places with ctp .
I have been trying to get my boss to go to ctp for ten yrs, with no luck until yesterday. She wants to go to ecomaxx-t processeless plates. The salesman is very confident we will like this. My question to you out there is what can i expect from these plates? Good,bad,or ugly?\
i have my doubts about this but its a start.

Any information would be appreciated.

Thankyou
mike

 

[Tommy B]

Fuji Plate

Fuji Plate

It is very similiar to Kodak Thermal Direct as it has a very light latent image that develops on press. Both are good plates but you need to have standards in place. your prepress department has to write on the back of the plate the color so you will know how to hang them on press. The other thing is with the Kodak plate you can not leave it out in light after exposing for more than 45minutes or so. the light will kill the plate, check with Fuji if is the same on theirs. Plate develops after about 10 pieces of paper. 100,000 impressions, 1-99% dot

 

[wilson]

Fuji Plate

Fuji Plate

Thanks Tommy,

How about the watersystem? I have alcolor, does fountain solution get contaminated?

 

[Tommy B]

fuji Plate

fuji Plate

If it is like the Kodak which I was trained on, then no. The unexposed emulsion is left on the paper. Ask them for a set of plates to run. You will need to test fount and washes on them, but once they processed on press they were very similar to a analog plate

 

[zcto7]

Our shop uses the Kodak thermal direct plates and they seem to work ok (i'll ask the pressman about them on Mon. when he comes in). We write the color on the gripper edge with a sharpie. (You can still see the text tags on the plates but there not easy to read.)

Presstek has a process-less plate that is daylight safe and has a dark image that you can see. I think they only last for 50,000 impressions though. The Presstek salesmen said I guess there working on fixing that soon.

 

[John@advantage]

plates

plates

my advice to you is stay away from presstek for many reasons lack of service and support and we can not get a plate to last longer than 5000 imp. long story if anyone would like to hear just contact me. we are currently looking to change and after many tests we fill that the eco max plate is the way to go.

 

[RGPW17100]

Do a lot of trials before you buy. We have an SM52 and we use the kodaks for about 4 months and switched to the pro t which I believe are not the ecomax and we had problems getting all the coating off on press. We also had problems with the coating contaminating the yellow ink so it looked gray after three or so plate changes. We also noticed a lot more foaming in our chiller with both these and the kodak plates. We found agfa azura plates to be much better. Image was good on the plate for us to calibrate and it was not light sensitive. Operators could see the image so no more running the wrong plates on the wrong units. Both kodak and the ecomax plates require a very expensive plate reader to read the image. In order to calibrate the plates you need to start linear and with these two plates the image is so faint a normal plate reader can not read them.

 

[Paultheprinter]

Hi there,

jusy a point to add about fount contamination, i ran a sm74 di for some time but only in conventional mode without thermal plates. Heidelberg get technotrans to put a different dosser on the fount so you can go above 5% and go up to 12% this must be for a reason, but has ive never used processless plates i will remain quietly sceptical

Paul

 

[Rocknronny]

my advice to you is stay away from presstek for many reasons lack of service and support and we can not get a plate to last longer than 5000 imp. long story if anyone would like to hear just contact me.

Sorry to get off topic but I to feel the same way about presstek. I still can't believe they any kind of customer base left.

RR

 

[Prepper]

Ecomaxx plates

Ecomaxx plates

We are in the process of starting up with these plates now. I found that it appears I can read this plate with my BetaLog 130 that I always used for film and plates if I hand develop them with 50-50 gum and water and then clean that off with water, I read a 50% patch on plate at 49-51% which is within tolerance of the device.

Also our ID tags at the edge of plates is 1/4" tall type and have no problems reading them on the plate.

We are having problem right now with Cyan only where the 1/4 tone and lower dots are blinding if we stop for nearly anything on the press. Fuji is coming Monday and I think they want us to change fount so we'll see. All the other colors are working fine so seems to be a weird combo of chemistry and ink and I'm sure they'll get it figured it out.