Seeing CTP in a New Light

By: Jim Rosenberg Returning to offset's original exposure source, a few developers have installed their first ultraviolet digital platesetters. Several of their first customer sites can now share their initial results -- and so far the news is encouraging.

A typical user reports computer-to-plate (CTP) savings in the thousands of dollars a month on film and processing chemicals alone, against cost increases ranging from nothing to a nickel-a-foot for higher-speed conventional plates. The same user can point to rapid start-up with few problems; faster-than-expected output; minimal training for personnel already comfortable with computers and familiar with press layouts; and retained value in an old plateline used as a back-up.

After several generations of drum and flatbed platesetters operating at different wavelengths of visible light -- followed by efforts to harness infrared energy in the direct exposure of plates -- the attraction of CTP output isn't hard to grasp. By eliminating a production step, printers cut time, labor, and quality deterioration (from image transfer), as well as the cost of page films, imagesetters, and film processing.

Still, the decision to make the move to CTP is a big deal. For starters, it requires a fully digital work flow and some way to proof pages that never see film. It also means, among other things, buying a new processor (or two) suited to a given plate type; nailing down sources and prices for plates that match exposure wavelength; and, depending on speed and volume requirements, automating plate loading and handling.

CTP relies on the same data that drive imagesetters which output the film used to burn plates in conventional platemaking. Like imagesetters, most digital platesetters rely on lasers delivering the same visible wavelengths capable of exposing film -- not the ultraviolet energy used in conventional platemaking.

So while newspapers could keep the raster image processors (RIPs) that drove their film imagers, they could not keep their plates. CTP meant spending more for new plates sensitive to visible light instead of plates sensitive to ultraviolet that behave in a similar fashion on-press.

At one time, the likely alternative seemed to be thermal, or infrared, imaging, which promised several advantages. Only after making a big impact in commercial printing did it move into newspaper production.

While thermal was proven in commercial shops, experience showed that operating costs could be higher, resolution was fixed, and prospects for entirely process-free plates soon dimmed. On the positive side, imager speeds increased, thermal plates are not subject to under- or overexposure, plate cost is not as high as for visible-light CTP, and baking greatly extended a plate's run life.

By the end of the 1990s, visible-light platesetting, most often on fast flatbed imagers, was in production at many papers. This proven process -- with a wide choice of platesetters, associated software systems, and several plate sources - has seen suppliers' numbers shrink, imaging speeds soar, and plate prices barely budge (from more than twice that of conventional plates).

Back to black light

Meanwhile, blue-violet laser diodes coming on the market exposed silver-based plates that cost at least three times the price of conventional UV plates, according to one blue-violet CTP supplier.

A few sites began testing platesetters that in different ways generated and directed ultraviolet light, in the hope of returning a conventional consumable to platerooms. This allows shops to hang their old processors on new platesetters and keep old imagesetters and platemaking lines as back-ups, rather than buying more platesetters.

In 1998, CTP pioneer Joe Donahue was testing a high-power, argon-ion, UV laser to expose high-speed conventional plates. His company, now part of PerkinElmer Optoelectronics, eventually unveiled what is marketed today as the ProForm Metro. At 1270 dots per inch (dpi), it images 250 high-speed plates per hour (pph).

About the same time, Germany's basysPrint was re-engineering its own nonlaser UV platesetting system. By the end of the decade, it had shifted from using a liquid-crystal-display panel and projection-speed plates to digitally signaling hundreds of thousands of micromirrors that independently direct light from a conventional UV lamp onto a conventional UV plate.

By last year, it was using a Texas Instruments device with 1.3 million micromirrors and a more powerful, longer-lasting lamp, significantly boosting speed. One model images at up to 50 pph at 900 dpi and 40 pph at 1270 dpi -- the other is rated at 100 and 85-to-90 pph at those respective resolutions.

In roughly the same time period, Purup-Eskofot followed another path to UV imaging by employing light-valve switching and fiber optics -- work that suffered a development setback before the company merged with Barco Graphics and, most recently, left the newspaper market.

UV imagesetting seemed ready to enter the mainstream when alfaQuest Technologies added the FasTrak CTP/C to its line of visible-light and thermal platesetters. It offers a choice of a 4- or 8-watt diode laser for 1016, 1200, 1524, or 1800 dpi resolutions. The device exposes conventional plates under bright-yellow-room-light conditions, and has the same automatic plate handling used in other FasTrak models. Its first UV users report the machines far exceed their specified speeds when run with recommended plates.

Exposure expenditure

Even so, the first UV CTP device promoted for news in the '90s still will move the most plates for the most dollars.

At $495,000, PerkinElmer's ProForm Metro shares the high end with other types of CTP exposure units aimed at the largest dailies. The ProForm competes on its higher throughput at a higher resolution and use of lower-cost conventional plates -- although only the higher-speed type was ever recommended. (The machine also can image visible-light and thermal plates, according to PerkinElmer.)

But at the company's initial customer site, El Diario/Wholesale Printing Products, El Paso, Texas, "the project [was] put on hold" just a few weeks before a ProForm Metro was to ship last year, says North America Sales Manager Guy Antley. He says it's very important to have equipment in live production to demonstrate to prospective customers that "here's something that's running in an environment like yours. We are still very focused on finding a site that will partner with us."

Sensing that "metro-class newspapers are watching developments very carefully," Antley says, "we firmly believe ... the 250 single plates per hour ... speaks to [that] specific segment."

The others' devices come in two versions operating at different speeds. BasysPrint offers its third-generation imager as a fully automated model with two imaging heads, the UV-Setter 57-Z (for $325,000), and as a manual model with a single head, the 57-f (for $159,000). Exposing standard- or high-speed plates at more-modest speeds, UV-Setter optics confer a quality advantage, according to basysPrint. It maintains that while lasers' round, less-defined dots necessarily overlap, UV-Setters' square, sharp-edged, small spots (10 to 28 microns) fit together seamlessly, affording higher quality from lower resolutions, which shortens RIP and imaging times.

Of some four dozen machines installed in North America, most are commercial models, but "newspaper is our fastest-growing segment. That has dominated our time here since the third quarter last year," says Jeff Hopkins, president of U.S. subsidiary basysPrint Corp. It has scheduled time at Nexpo with CTP seekers "all ... wanting installation first quarter of 2004." Among them are The Buffalo (N.Y.) News and dailies large and small from seven newspaper groups.

If all elect to install UV-Setters, Hopkins says he thinks basysPrint will be able to fill the orders by this time next year, when the German factory that makes five units a month will turn out eight. The United States now takes 30% of its output.

Automated two-head machines are aimed primarily at 60,000- to 130,000-circulation dailies. BasysPrint has nine such units installed, two on order, and at least one more expected to be added to an existing site. After tests last summer at The Post-Standard, Syracuse, N.Y., pairs of UV-Setters went into other Advance Publications Inc. papers in New York and Springfield, Mass. A third Advance site, the Kalamazoo (Mich.) Gazette, also will get two -- the first arriving by July after basysPrint shows it at Nexpo with the paper's full plateline, including a Nela Ternes punch-bender.

Its first U.S. newspaper customer, however, was the 11,433-circulation Enterprise-Journal, McComb, Miss., which has been outputting plates for itself and a half-dozen weeklies on a slower, single-head, manually fed model. That machine moved last week to a smaller Emmerich Newspapers Inc. daily, The Greenwood (Miss.) Commonwealth, when personnel from basysPrint and Kenner, La.-based PrePress Systems upgraded the Enterprise-Journal to a third-generation model that is expected to be 40% faster. (The older model handled process color at 1 to 11/2 minutes per color per page.)

In the meantime, another manual UV-Setter has been ordered by Cleveland Newspapers Inc.'s 7,881-circulation The Daily Tribune News, Cartersville, Ga.

AlfaQuest may have come late to UV, but as one of the market's top two output-systems suppliers, it's made its mark fast: four FasTraks installed at four sites in four states; four more now installing in Arizona at two Western Newspapers Inc. sites (among the first on FasTraks, using blue-laser exposure); another six sold in three states to three dailies circulating 41,000 to 48,000 copies; and one pending sale.

"That's actually helped us," basysPrint's Hopkins volunteers, "because it's promoted the concept of UV CTP." AlfaQuest (formerly Monotype) is the only long-established, widely installed firm with a UV product, while also selling a range of visible-light and thermal platesetters against competition from industry heavyweights Western Lithotech (Lastra Group) and Agfa/Autologic.

AlfaQuest prices are $240,000 for its 4-watt FasTrak and $300,000 for the 8-watt model -- a Trakmate 350-plate autoloader and slipsheet remover adds another $60,000. Besides midrange pricing, alfaQuest can boast the speed of laser imaging and the longer life and lower replacement cost of diode lasers.

Cost of burnout

Lasers are a big component of cost, and none lasts forever. Whereas basysPrint's mercury-vapor lamp is a $1,500 part guaranteed for 2,000 hours' service, lasers last longer but cost much more. At $35,000, the ProForm's 7-watt gas laser is expected to run for 5,000 hours (a year or more, depending on its duty cycle) when operated at its recommended 3 watts, according to Antley, who adds that work is "being done with the solid-state lasers."

That work with UV laser diodes has been under way in a parallel development -- a platesetter powerful enough to image UV-sensitive photopolymer flexo plates at acceptable speeds. Antley says PerkinElmer is "very close to ... a point in the manufacturing process" where it can bring in development partner MacDermid Printing Solutions "and show them full capability."

The diode manufacturer guarantees the FasTrak's 4-watt laser for 10,000 hours, "but we expect it to be 20,000 hours -- and that's exposure time," Dennis Nierman says. The alfaQuest president is referring to a fact that helps account for a diode laser's longer life: It need only emit a laser while actually imaging, unlike exposure sources requiring power-up time that precludes start-and-stop operation with each plate.

Nierman is quick to add that although a laser head is expensive, its power supply and chiller, for example, will not necessarily need replacement, and usually only one of its three $15,000 diodes dies at a time.

Back at basysPrint, lamp service of 2,500 hours is expected by year's end. "We just need to run the lamp cooler, and the [service] life goes up," says Hopkins. UV illumination from a nonlaser lamp (in a contact frame or platesetter) can fall to an inadequate level before a lamp's electrical failure.

Service contracts can cover lamp- or laser-replacement labor costs or operators can train for the job. Among the first U.S. fast-57-Z sites, a Harte-Hanks Inc. shopper site in California is trained in lamp replacement and Advance's Staten Island (N.Y.) Advance will call basysPrint. Gordon Clark, production manager of the American Press in Lake Charles, La., plans to attend a diode-replacement class given by the laser maker (as he did with an earlier imager).

Operation of PerkinElmer's ProForm at 3 watts makes for prolonged, productive platesetting. The laser not only lasts longer but also is capable of exposing high-speed plates that cost about the same and run about as long as standard-speed plates.

The fact the ProForm was not intended to handle ordinary plates -- not if users want UV imaging to match speeds possible with visible-light photopolymer plates -- is something "we've tried to promote from Day One," says Antley. "We have tried to be very forthcoming about the fact that, sure, you could run a standard plate ... but why would you want to do that? It's slow."

Making plates

All three manufacturers say American Litho Inc.'s Mach II can be imaged at their platesetters' rated speeds. Designed for the ProForm and UV-Setters, Citiplate Inc.'s LHP is principally a commercial-printing product. The ProForm also runs plates from Anocoil, and its originator, Sonoran Scanners, reportedly had success with Agfa and Kodak Polychrome Graphics plates.

BasysPrint's Hopkins adds Western Lithotech, Precision Lithograining, and Southern Lithoplate to the list. Worldwide, basysPrint claims compatibility with 45 different plates from 14 manufacturers.

"Starting out, we're using an American Litho plate," says Clark. One of three Shearman Corp. dailies (the others are in Colorado and New Mexico), his American Press early last month switched to a UV FasTrak after running an early blue-laser model since 1998. "It's pretty much conventional, but it's a little higher speed," says Clark, adding that alfaQuest's other FasTrak CTP/C sites use it.

While prices depend on several factors in addition to sensitivity, most sites report paying about five cents more per square foot for faster plates. Before converting to CTP, the 37,760-circulation American Press paid 45 to 48 cents a foot for conventional plates. Five years later, it's paying 55 cents for the slightly faster version.

Others quoted lower prices, says Clark, but, for now, his paper is sticking with what it knows will work. Generally, he adds, recommended plates are priced between 45 and 55 cents a foot.

At least one UV CTP site reported a price just under that range (though still about a nickel higher than it had been paying for standard-speed plates). And at Salt Lake City's Newspaper Agency Corp., which prints The Deseret News and The Salt Lake Tribune (combined weekday circulations of 211,271), the American Litho Mach II plates run through its basysPrint UV-Setter "are actually cheaper" than regular plates from another supplier, says Production Vice President Terry Northrup.

In Lake Charles, too, "Our savings are going to be on our plates," says Clark -- especially compared with the $1.30 per square foot spent on plates for the older argon-ion FasTrak. "It's going to be a payback in less than two years," he says. And because the sole source of plates for the blue-laser system was Agfa, after it acquired DuPont's Howson business, "the major benefit is it gives us choices in plates," says Clark. He now can choose among six.

Salt Lake also is a five-year veteran of CTP -- not only its own and not only visible-light. As a USA Today print site, it's run photopolymer plates through a Barco platesetter, and "we tested a thermal system for about a year and a half," says Northrup. He reports higher plate costs without results that would justify it.

Clark remembers talk in the '90s that, as CTP spread, papers would pay less for the plates owing to competition and economies of scale in manufacturing: "But we never did. We were paying the same price that we were when we started out, five years earlier."

For Northrup, there's even more to the math. CTP plate pricing drew the agency to basysPrint, he says, in part because production often made four iterations of a plate from a negative. Exposing four identical non-UV plates on a platesetter reduces the benefits of CTP by multiplying the outlay for already more-expensive plates.

BasysPrint's smallest site in production was lured by the same prospect. To take advantage of savings and superior register, "our owner, Wyatt Emmerich, was wanting to go computer-to-plate," recalls Enterprise-Journal Production Superintendent Keith Hux. After considering several systems, the paper looked at basysPrint's use of UV exposure. "They made it very affordable by doing that," he says.

The McComb daily continues buying from Southern Lithoplate, only now it gets a faster subtractive plate than before. It looked at a higher-priced Western Lithotech plate, but found it offered more quality than necessary for printing on newsprint. Southern Lithoplate's product, says Assistant Production Superintendent Donald Carlisle, delivers good newspaper quality, though not quite as fast as Western Lithotech's plate.

Hux adds that the paper has been a Southern Lithoplate customer for so long that he doesn't think the faster plate's price rose any higher than it would be now for the standard plate. In any event, he adds, competition is suppressing everyone's price, and, as for staying with his longtime supplier, "You just can't beat their service."

Preserve the processor?

Just as plates turned out to be not quite the same ones newspapers had burned from film, processors aren't always the same as before. "It takes a different processor," Northrup says of Salt Lake's UV-Setter, adding that an early difficulty was solved by switching to a larger processor.

But that doesn't mean users are dissatisfied. "The thing that makes me happiest is the processing end of this," says Clark.

More familiar than is the case with visible-light plates, processing UV CTP plates is cleaner, without silver in the effluent. Clark hopes that if less clogging will mean less maintenance, he'll see labor savings even beyond those obtained from the initial conversion from film output to CTP.

Labor savings, in fact, were reported by all sites. But because of attrition, assignment to other positions or newspapers, and earlier conversion to CTP, no jobs were lost among the UV CTP sites consulted.

The American Press kept neither its old processor nor its old platemaker as backup. "We went with a Glunz & Jensen," Clark says, because "we wanted to have an in-line processor." It did move the autoloader to the UV model from the old FasTrak, which it keeps as backup -- "because we're pretty sure we'll change out the argon to a UV laser ... by the end of the year."

Changing the processor, moving the autoloader, and upgrading the exposure unit are made possible because the system consists of three separate, wheeled modules. The change to UV exposure he called "a one-day job" -- the most important task is ensuring alignment to provide a good plate path.

McComb kept its additive-plate processor. But taken apart, cleaned, and fitted with new rollers as needed, the unit uses more chemicals than the old plateline. "You'd do a lot better if you have a processor made to do subtractive plates," says Carlisle, who also warns that the effect of temperature changes on a processor can cause quality loss. The American Press found it needed to add a chiller to its processor, according to Clark.

Even for the Enterprise-Journal, it wasn't as simple as buying a new processor. Whatever was selected had to accommodate larger, 36-by-24-inch plates for the Web Press Corp. Quad-Stack four-color unit that the paper runs with its News King press.

Other costs and benefits

McComb added the Quad-Stack because it had been S-wrapping on the News King but could not hold register.

The Quad-Stack couples offered circumferential and lateral register control and plate skewing. On the News King units, the paper went from 85- to 90-line screens, but on the Quad it runs 120 lines, always in register, according to Hux. With that and CTP's first-generation dot, he says, "you can't beat the quality."

A Konica proofer outputs color pages on newsprint, which hang on the pressroom wall, "and that's what the pressmen set their ink for," says Hux. PrePress Systems also installed that Hewlett-Packard-based printer and worked up ICC color profiles for all devices, from monitors to press.

Production still outputs film from three weeklies' and a college paper's portable document format (PDF) files, with pages from the ECRM Mako RIP directed either to a Konica imagesetter or to the UV-Setter.

"We're never behind the press," says Carlisle. Remaking the rare bad plate is the only delay, but when it happens, he says, outputting it from the platesetter takes longer than burning a new one from film. PrePress Systems Service Manager Bob Butz "taught me every trick there is" to output a problem page, says Hux. At worst, "maybe once a year," a black-only PDF just cannot be output, he notes. But it always seems to work on a laser printer. So the file is run off the laser printer and a page is shot on the big old camera that the newspaper held onto. A plate is then burned in a contact frame and double-burned as a complete page in the UV-Setter -- a trick they couldn't pull off using visible-light or thermal plates.

Echoing others' comments that CTP cannot always be distinguished from conventional output by a casual look at pages or plates, Salt Lake's Northrup says he sees little quality improvement from photopolymer, thermal, or UV platesetting. But with "the elimination of a generation of dot," he says, "we're considering a higher line screen." Probably moving from 100 to 105 lines "would be our next phase," he continues, if the agency works out all platesetting bugs, stays with UV exposure, and goes to 100% CTP.

When everything jells

Generally satisfied with conventional halftones, most users seem in no hurry to experiment with stochastic screening, which varies the frequency of very small dots rather than the size of a given number of uniformly angled dots.

BasysPrint's Hopkins calls the technique "really nothing new for us," with commercial sites seeing improved flesh tones and small detail. Newspaper interest, he says, relates to potentially better print quality, especially in terms of register issues. But CTP alone, he adds, addresses that concern.

"We're probably not going to go with FM screening," says Clark in Lake Charles, referring to frequency-modulated stochastic dot placement. When Salt Lake tried stochastic screening with its thermal platesetter, says Northrup, no appreciable difference was discernible when one mixed up plates imaged with different screening techniques. Nevertheless, he may take a second look at stochastic screening after a move to a higher line screen.

Northrup probably can speak for the others when he calls equipment set-up and training a "straightforward" process. The initial challenge, he says, is getting everything from the plates and exposure unit to the new Burgess Industries bender to work together, tweaking something every day until it all finally "jells" as a system.

His UV-Setter was installed in mid-January, he says, "with the understanding that if it worked, we would expand [with another unit], and if it didn't, we'd return it." Three weeks later, it began outputting plates for production, along with the two original platemaking lines. But, by late last month, it was making 80% to 90% of the papers' plates. The staff is still learning, Northrup says, but "there are some days when everything is run off the basys."

Installation "was pretty smooth" in Lake Charles, where initial difficulties were confined to delivery of too-narrow plates. Clark said transition from blue to UV CTP was easier and involved less training than from film to CTP. The RIP and other software are little changed, "and the FasTrak itself pretty much works the same," says Clark.

Beyond the other advantages, "We think that, once we're 100% CTP we can save somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes," says Northrup.

It's time Salt Lake's newsroom and distribution crew can fight for. At the biggest operation testing UV platesetting, "the jury is still out," says Northrup. "Almost every day we're coming closer and closer to committing."