suprasetter feedback

ar17

Well-known member
we're about to replace our creo ts3244 with a suprasetter. the old creo has been with us for the last 5 years without breakdown and had three thermal head replacements with an average of 11000 lamphours per head. we are looking at upgrading the productivity from 10 plates per hour to 16 plates or more. is the suprasetter comparable to an old creo in terms of reliability and consistency? thanks
 
The two suprasetters (A74 models) I have worked with were the most reliable workhorse prepress equipment I have ever worked with. They just didn't break, complain or cause any problems.
 
We have a Suprasetter 74. The thing is a dog. It is the most unreliable piece of equipment I have ever had in any prepress environment. It constantly has connectivity and centering issues. It is extremely slow, at least coming from a shop that ran a Fuji Saber 6000. It has no external control of the buffer drive. If you send plates to it then get a rush request, you have to wait till all the plates in the buffer finish before you can push the next one through. There is no pause function on this device or recovery if you send a bad plate. But at least it autoloads from a cassette.
 
We have a Suprasetter 105 (3 lasers - 18 plates per hour) with SCL. It was installed 2-1/2 years ago and has been very reliable. We image approx 1,500 40" plates and 200 25" plates per month. We have imaged a total of 54,000 plates over 24,271 "power on" hours and 2,862 exposure hours.

The lasers on these machines only run while imaging. This reduces the amount of electricity consumed and also should increase the lifespan of the laser.
 
suprasetter feedback

we're about to replace our creo ts3244 with a suprasetter. the old creo has been with us for the last 5 years without breakdown and had three thermal head replacements with an average of 11000 lamphours per head. we are looking at upgrading the productivity from 10 plates per hour to 16 plates or more. is the suprasetter comparable to an old creo in terms of reliability and consistency? thanks

I have managed both and both have been good machines over all. I enjoyed the reliance of the Creo and the ability of service to just turn off this or that and keep me running while I waited on the tech. With the Creo, there is just few moving parts to break. I did not have any automation and that made things simple.

As far as the Suprasetter, the automation is great when it works. We fill the cassettes up and let them run. When there is an problem, it can be an issue to get it resolved-just because the way it moves plates through the machine is much more complicated. It loads plates in a fashion very similar to moving paper through a press-if anyone knows how to do this, its Heidelberg. The speed is great and overall when combined with Prinect-its a very nice system.

mark
 
We have a Suprasetter 74. The thing is a dog. It is the most unreliable piece of equipment I have ever had in any prepress environment. It constantly has connectivity and centering issues. It is extremely slow, at least coming from a shop that ran a Fuji Saber 6000. It has no external control of the buffer drive. If you send plates to it then get a rush request, you have to wait till all the plates in the buffer finish before you can push the next one through. There is no pause function on this device or recovery if you send a bad plate. But at least it autoloads from a cassette.


There are a couple of inaccuracies to your statement.

First of all the Suprasetter comes in three different speeds. The slowest is rated at about 21 plates an hour; personally I run plates for a Heidelberg SM74 and get 19 plates per hour from the moment I push the button until the last plate is out... including processing. Just like any other device it's dependent on the material you use. I use Agfa Energy Elite plates.

My Suprasetter is the slowest model, with only two lasers. You can upgrade to up to 5 lasers in the field, start slow and add them if you don't think it's working fast enough.

Recovery if you send a bad plate? No, once you send it there's no going back. But if you're saying that it doesn't recover well from failure, that's dead wrong. Compared to platesetters based on the Screen device (like Topsetter, Platerite, etc.) it's almost self-correcting. With 60,000 plates through it there have been maybe 5 times it didn't automatically eject a bent plate.

And, as far as moving a plate up to the front of the queue, it was addressed recently with a software update. If you press "Urgent" then the plate is the next one sent through. Because the machine multitasks it may take 1-2 plates before your requested plate starts.
 
Lamontcranston,

Currently our suprasetter outputs SM72 plates at just over 13 plates per hour using Heidelbergs chem-free plates. In 2003 A Fuji Saber Luxel, which is a violet internal drum, was outputting the same size plates at a rate of 23 per hour on a single laser.

The device itself recovers fine from internal plate failures. But you can not recover if you send a bad plate or multiple plates until they finish, there is no emergency pause or buffer clear. Yes you can send a plate as urgent but it will only move to the head of the queue for plates that have not been buffered. I have discussed this ad nauseum with Heidelberg techs. They say that what I am requesting isn't possible. If you know that it is possible, I am more than willing to hear how to make it work as it will definitely simplify my workflow.
 
LIke other users, our suprasetter 105 has been one of the worst devices I have installed in 25 years of prepress experience.

The service log on our device reads like war and peace. At one point, we were having to get engineers in every 1-2 weeks. When (not if) the device errors (which is far too often), it can take up to 20mins to reboot (when it reboots first time!) - our screen device (on the rare occasions that it errors) reboots within 2 minutes. Our device is and has been anything but reliable.

However, I am aware of other users with very positive experiences of the Suprasetter - in my experience having spoken to other users it seems the split is 50:50 between users with good devices and users (like me) with 'Friday afternoon' machines.

My advice would be that if you do sign up to the suprasetter, don't sign it off until you're absolutely certain that it can do what has been promised.
 
Lamontcranston,
Currently our suprasetter outputs SM72 plates at just over 13 plates per hour using Heidelbergs chem-free plates. In 2003 A Fuji Saber Luxel, which is a violet internal drum, was outputting the same size plates at a rate of 23 per hour on a single laser.
.

You can't realistically compare thermal and violet technologies adhoc like that. You cannot image a violet plate with a thermal platesetter or a thermal plate with a violet platesetter. The different technologies have different strengths and weaknesses. You can find many discussions about these all over the forum. I have worked with both thermal and violet CtP devices and I personally have found thermal to be more reliable, redundant and an overall better experience for the operator.

The Suprasetter comes in different thermal laser configurations and models for the same press size. The low-end A model is significantly slower than other Suprasetter models. You get what you pay for when it comes to the number of laser diodes and the respective speed of imaging.
 
I am well aware of the differences in thermal vs. violet devices, but don't you feel in 7 years we should be able to produce thermal plates with a little better technology than what it was then. 5 years ago this same company I now work for had a topsetter thermal device. This current suprasetters only advantage has been the addition of automatic plateloading and online developing.

This particular machine is probably at the bottom of Heidelbergs line, and I very much agree that you get what you pay for, however with Heidelberg that isn't necessarily the case. There are much better options with better pricing from dedicated prepress vendors than what Heidelberg has to offer. I have yet to find anyone including the Heidelberg tech that say any of these issues can be fixed. I was actually told that if I got more training the device would then do the functions I expected it to and when I dug further into that offer I was told, no, it wouldn't fix it but I would appreciate the system more. I wasn't here when the machine was purchased so I am stuck dealing with the problems that exist.

If you like your supra, I think that's great, but I've seen better.
 
Our Suprasetter 74 with full automation was installed in February 2007, and we have had very few problems. The speed of the machine is what we expected with two lasers, and if we want more, we'll pay for more. In its current configuration, it stays WAY ahead of the presses.

In our experience, plate load problems are almost always caused by plates that are bent or dogeared in the cassette, and the machine does recover well and on its own. Yes, the error correction time seems lengthy at times, but nothing reboots fast enough when you're waiting for it.

One of the biggest reasons we stayed with Heidelberg and bought a Supra (which replaced a Prosetter 74) was the ability to run plates manually should the automation fail. This happened earlier this year, in fact, but all we had to do was lift the cover to the online processor bridge and manually feed plates until the autoloader was repaired. The competitors machines that we shopped didn't have this option.
 

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