Primed pressroom

It seems, then, that making sure the platesetting area of a litho pressroom is primed for the ever-more ubiquitous short-run, on-demand jobs needn't mean paying vast amounts for the fastest platesetter.

Certainly, there are commercial printing outfits – such as those printing magazines and brochures, those with 10- or 12-colour presses, those with many presses to feed, and those priding themselves on catering for last-minute requests – who will benefit from a 60pph model. But many will be equally well-served by a machine that runs at 40-, 30- or even 20pph.

The key message to take from manufacturers' warnings about this being a neglected area of the litho pressroom is that care must be taken to ensure you have the right speed for your business, whatever that may be. The key here is to check you have the right workflow system, plate sortation equipment and automatic loading kit to allow your platesetter to do its thing.

In this way, litho printers can ensure digital doesn't steal the show, so litho printing sits alongside 'short-run', 'on-demand' and 'quick turnaround' on printers' lips.

Welshpool Printing Group, based 20 miles west of Shrewsbury in Powys, Wales, upgraded its platesetter from a 15-plates-per-hour (pph) Agfa Galileo to a 32pph Kodak Magnus three years ago. The firm would wholeheartedly recommend other printers follow suit in switching to a faster model.

A faster platesetter has enabled the company to offer speedier turnarounds on the range of newspaper, football programme and trade magazine work it processes on its three Komori four- and five-colour B2 presses and Heidelberg PrintMaster machine.

"Customers have noticed that we can offer faster turnarounds now," reports managing director Paul Jones. "Within 20 minutes of receiving the job you can have it on the press."

"A faster platesetter is also a real help when someone wants to change the design of a page at the last minute, or  when a plate splits on-press," he adds. "Because it's running so much quicker you can produce another plate in two minutes."

Although short-run jobs are usually placed with the company's digital department, Jones says that if a request for a short-run job that also needed to be litho quality came along, having a speedy platesetter would ensure the company could process this job at an economical rate.

Jones would advise others to scrutinise carefully whether those systems supporting the platesetter were helping it achieve its full potential. The company opted for a Kodak platesetter because they were keen to upgrade to a Kodak Prinergy workflow system and felt that, as well as the Magnus kit being impressive in its own right, the platesetter they chose would perform best if totally in sync with the workflow supporting it.

Jones would also advise that a 30pph machine will be more than fast enough for most commercial printing operations.

"Our Magnus is totally catering for our production requirements at the moment," he says. "We'd only invest in a faster machine if we were processing a lot more work or if people were coming to us demanding shorter print runs of litho quality. But we only run the platesetter for eight hours a day. We ran the old one for 16 hours, so there's still room for boosting production."