New Players in the Flexo-Plate Market

By: Jim Rosenberg The expertise of big European and U.S. chemicals companies may restore competition to the market for newspaper flexo printing plates. Since W.R. Grace and Hercules exited the newspaper market, platemaking systems supplier NAPP Systems, now part of MacDermid Printing Solutions, has had the news flexo field to itself for years.

Despite a customer base of fewer than three dozen dailies in the U.S., NAPP/MacDermid has kept research and development alive and the pricing of flexo plates affordable -- though they remain more costly than those for offset. But production executives are seldom happy with just one consumables supplier -- whether ink, paper, or plates. Some see another drawback in the difficulties of developing computer-to-plate (CTP) for news flexo.

Work by two companies familiar with flexography has led one to return to newspaper platemaking and the other to take a second look at the market.

BASF Printing Systems, which has supported flexo shops in Italy since the 1980s, also manufactures Aquanews flexo ink. Citing water-based flexography as an established alternative method for newspaper printing, it announced at this month's Ifra Expo, in Leipzig, Germany, that it had successfully test-printed the nyloflex N 36 -- a mono-layer plate consisting of a steel base coated with a light-sensitive polymer.

According to BASF, the nyloflex N 36 resists swelling in aqueous inks and preserves image definition and ink coverage throughout "extremely high print runs." Platemaking includes a closed circuit for the washout agent and inline preparation from the washer to the anti-tacking stage.

It is not known if the plates will ever become available in the United States, but "at present," said BASF Printing Systems Marketing Manager Terri Stewart, "we are not planning to introduce the flexo plate for newspaper printing in the U.S." This country is home to 90% of flexo newspapers, although Associated Newspapers Ltd.'s Harmsworth Quays Printing plant, in London, and the flexo plants that print Italy's La Repubblica use large volumes of plates.

Just as BASF was bringing its new N 36 to market, another polymers producer active in flexo began eyeing newspapers again. In 1988, DuPont tried to interest the industry in a version of its Cyrel plate, which was shown at several press makers' Nexpo exhibits. Though flexo was then gaining momentum, the version of its successful package-printing plate never caught on at newspapers, for which its exposure was too slow, according to Ray Bodwell, DuPont Imaging Technologies Cyrel digital marketing manager.

"Cyrel enjoys a nice position in the packaging world, but it's never been a good fit in the newspaper world," he said. Interest in CTP and its own new plate has DuPont looking again. "We have now got a thermal-process plate" that uses no solvent, said Bodwell, formerly of Crosfield Electronics and earlier with weekly newspapers in New Jersey and California. They also offer an analog version, for working from film.

Now only made in a thickness suitable for the packaging market, the plate is exposed by laser in devices made by Creo and Esko-Graphics. They include models for plates in the 25-by-30-inch ($125,000-$150,000) and 351/2-by-471/4-inch ($200,000-$225,000) ranges.

A raster image processor passes pages as 1-bit TIF files to the exposure unit. There, YAG or thermal-diode laser ablation creates an image in the solid-sheet photopolymer plate's surface layer - a two-micron black mask. "It looks as if you've got the imaged emulsion of a negative laminated directly on the surface of the plate," said Bodwell.

The next step, he explained, is through-the-mask ultraviolet exposure. The UV light passes through ablated areas of the mask, cross-linking and hardening the polymers "so that the image is transferred to the plate itself." From there, the plate moves through a thermal processor that melts the unhardened non-image area, from which the "unexposed monomer is wicked away," Bodwell explained. The plate emerges dry, he added, and requires only a couple of minutes of post-exposure UV before mounting.

Known as Cyrel Fast, the plate and dry processing have been used in packaging for almost three years. Bodwell estimated that a 351/2-by-471/4-inch machine images in about 15 minutes; its plates are exposed in six to seven minutes, and spend about 10 minutes in the processor before a final four to five minutes of UV post-exposure. "Once you start imaging," he said, "you should get a plate out every 15 minutes." DuPont aims at moving two pages in 10 minutes through one of the new smaller-format machines.

So, a two-machine operation conceivably could plate a 48-page paper in two hours -- about half the speed now offered for low-end offset newspaper CTP for about the same price, but also with the built-in back-up of twin imagers.

Bodwell said that because plate pricing is based on volume, newspapers, even small dailies, stand to benefit. Package-printing plates typically run from 11 cents to 16 cents per square inch. Whatever a thinner newspaper plate's price, it will be less, he said, because "plate cost is directly related to the thickness of the polymer."