Shane Smith owns Park Douglas in Mildura, a 25-year-old family business with eight staff. For this specialised print house, 80% of its work is drinks coasters, using specially modified two- and four-colour Solna presses, which print 24-up.

Smith’s ageing film processor had got to the point where he was “coming in every day praying”. Meanwhile, film is becoming scarcer and more expensive. So last year, he decided to go CTP. Outsourcing was not an option due to typical two-day time lags, which would not have worked for his Racebook contract, as well as freight costs and reliability.

A fellow printer had bought a second-hand premium platesetter with an original value of around $250,000 for a bargain-basement $20,000, and Smith was tempted to go down this route.

But when his friend reported technical snags, he knew that logistically, this was not an option. Park Douglas is located 600km from Melbourne and 1,000km from Sydney. “It would cost me $1,000 a trip to get somebody out to look at it.”

Instead, Smith spoke to Melbourne-based supplier AGS Allpoints and in June 2010 bought a Glunz & Jensen iCTP 2400 for $55,000. The entry-level A2 setter was more than double what he would have spent on a replacement filmsetter, but was “the shortest, least expensive route into CTP for us. The bank would have let us have a lot more, but I didn’t see it necessary to go that way, to spend $50,000 more just to go quicker, if what I’d get was going to work. And it has worked… the only thing it hasn’t got is the speed.” 

But plates-per-hour is not a huge issue at Park Douglas. “We might go two days without a plate and then get 15 out the following day,” says Smith.

“From what we were doing on film, I believe we’ve got a 20-25% quality improvement. We’re running some intricate work, and we’re seeing a lift.”

At Unanderra NSW, on the Wollongong steel belt, nine-staff Coastline Printing long ago amortised the $160,000 invested in its Kodak Magnus 400 A2 setter, purchased with Matchprint proofing and a Prinergy Evo workflow more than three years ago. Never a fan of outsourcing to trade bureaus, if only to avoid the headaches of sending out a single errant plate for re-imaging, managing director Ross Freestone says the decision to migrate from negative film to an upper mid-range platesetter with all the extras – except auto plate feeding – was one he never regretted. He intends to replace it with something similar.

At some 30 plates a day, speed is a factor at Coastline. The sheetfed company’s order book carries its share of Blue Scope-related work, corporate printing, and electoral material for South Coast MPs. An older system used before the Magnus “requires around 15 minutes to expose a plate, by the time you expose the plate, shoot a negative and lay the plate down, while the Magnus 400 takes only two minutes for each plate. We generally run a 150 line-screen on our work, sometimes 175, depending on the job. The changeover is simple on the Magnus software,” says Freestone.

He is prepared to pay for attributes such as ease of use and reliability, and says these are not readily found at the entry level. In the years since his Magnus arrived, all he has tweaked is the plates – he has dusted off his processor and reverted to processed plates after initially running Thermal Direct. He says that’s been a pattern across the industry. “I think 99% who use these units have done the same, as the plate that runs up on the press wasn’t suitable.”

Lindsay Yates Group (LYG) is set to invest in a top-spec A1-format Heidelberg Suprasetter. The Suprasetter 105 Multiloader, which processes Kodak plates and comes bundled with a full Prinect workflow, was scheduled to be installed at the end of March. 

The Sydney sheetfed company’s managing director, Paul Richardson, says the upgrade is from an eight-year-old A1 platesetter from Screen, which was running Agfa plates in Trueflow. While it had served the company well, it was due for replacement. 

The pre-press investment is part of a general expansion going on at LYG’s Artarmon facility. The company will also add a new press and mailing gear to the production floor in some months’ time. Investing in productivity is not a novel idea at LYG. The company was the beta site for the Da Vinci MIS around six years ago. It has also adopted a lean philosophy and installed high-speed MBO bindery machinery from Ferrostaal, compressing turnaround times and labour costs.

Richardson said the new Suprasetter will be all about automation, but was philosophical about the CTP trimmings he was adding to his line-up. “You can’t rule out an entry-level platesetter either. There are companies around that can’t afford automation, nor do they need it.”

That said, he emphasised the key point of the Heidelberg CTP install – a ‘plate-on-demand’ system comprising a remote link between the platesetter and the presses that enables a press operator to output a plate straight from the platesetter to LYG’s Heidelberg fleet, comprising an XL 105, a six-colour 74 with coater and a five-colour 52. The automated CTP approach cuts out the need for a pre-press operator to be on call 24 hours a day to lay plates. Considering the likely drop in error rates from repetitive tasks and the boost in the quality of plates on their way to the presses, the investment soon pays off.

It is also a question of print volumes justifying the capital spend, says Richardson. “Full automation means these setters can run virtually around the clock because they’re automatically loadable and they hardly need any manual intervention after hours. So, for a company working a 24-hour shift, you don’t necessarily need to have a plate maker 24 hours.

“And because of the advent of shorter-run work, we’ve seen major changes. Years ago, offset runs were a lot longer, so the pressures on getting plates to presses weren’t as great as they are now. The playing field’s changed – shorter runs, more plates, and you need to keep the presses going.”

In fact, Richardson calculates that the new breed of fully automatic platesetters can be two to three times more productive than a manual counterpart. “From my point of view, it’s mainly about the productivity of the setter.”

LYG already has some Prinect pre-press portals but a fully fledged workflow is another spur to productivity, he believes.

How can you gauge what level of invest-ment is right? Soeren Lange, Heidel-berg’s product manager, pre-press & Prinect, says that pricing depends heavily on the ‘package’. Does it come with workflow? If you choose workflow, what level?

“As a rough guideline, a CTP-plus-workflow package would start at around $100,000, although less is possible, depending on needs, and can reach several hundreds of thousands if everything is included. What we have seen in general is that customers do focus more on workflow than on CTP. A CTP ‘box’ is easier to replace than a workflow, so more time should be spent on evaluating that.

“Also the plate technology should be a focus. We can provide calculations on running costs for different plate technologies based on individual plate volumes. These differences can be significant and need to be considered before a decision is made.”

Shepparton-based Willprint, which services Goulburn Valley dairy and fruit customers, already had a high degree of automation in its plate room, but late last year replaced a fully automatic Heidelberg Polysetter with a Suprasetter A52/75 thermal unit with automatic loading.

Maintaining a productive plate flow to its two Speedmasters – a four-colour straight press and a two-colour perfector – was a priority. But managing director Ian Almond says the change was environ-men-tally driven. The Suprasetter uses Kodak Thermal Direct processless plates. He estimates a saving of almost $5,000 a year on chemicals alone, not to mention water. “We’ve been able to reduce our collections of chemicals for disposal from four to five a year, down to a single pickup.” 

Send it out

Before you bring a plate line under your roof, or upgrade your present one, consider the advantages of outsourcing. The trend over the past decade has been to ‘insource’ CTP. Few know this better than the pre-press trade bureaus, which have largely gone to the wall. But the fact remains that a third-party repro service enables you to eliminate a major cost centre. The few premium pre-press businesses in Australia today have survived for a reason – they offer timeliness, diverse services and quality, a far cry from a lot of the trade shops of the 1990s. Don’t necessarily think of straight outsourcing though. 

Pageset, a 23-year-old privately owned Melbourne-based business, offers pre-press services throughout eastern Australia, on its own sites or on a customer’s. It is currently extending its services to regional areas of Victoria, NSW and Queensland. 

Managing director John Della notes it is now 11 years since the company began its first facility management contract with the country’s biggest book printer, McPherson’s Print Group, operating its plate production, workflow and logistics on site. Apart from the convenience of having it right there under McPherson’s roof, the book firm can focus on core competencies, confident its repro is being managed from outside, says Della. Pageset performs similar services for a number of key commercial printers in Sydney and Melbourne.

“A lot of printers, while they know they have to have all their front-end available for their customers, are finding that with the hardware and software, they’ve forever got their hand in their pocket,” he says. 

“It’s hard to find a half-sheet printer who can invest $250,000 in pre-press – they’ll put in a RIP and proofer – but we can offer them access to over $750,000 of workflow. So, we can be the front-end of every print shop in Australia.”

Della emphasises that printers need to consider their volumes and “do the numbers”. It’s not black and white. “We have levels of our solution we can intro-duce. We could install minimal hardware on a customer’s site, basically a proofer and platesetter, and have the smarts and software at one of our larger divisions or our head office run it remotely.”

Pageset is constantly re-investing in its kit. On its networked facilities in Melbourne and Sydney, it operates Heidelberg Prinect and Kodak Prinergy workflows, with fully automated full-sheet Suprasetters, Trendsetters and Magnus platesetters running Kodak Thermal Direct processless plates, Kodak Approval XP4 proofing – even Kodak NexPress digital printing and Océ Arizona UV flatbed inkjet – for commercial sheetfed printers. It also has an Esko workflow and automation technology for labels, packaging and cartons.

But what Pageset is offering is not just headache-free access to bells and whistles. “Anyone can get a lease on a box or software, but try finding high-calibre people in the trade,” says Della.

It is a dwindling resource maintained through intensive training within Pageset. Combine that with R&D and the best technology, and one-plus-one suddenly equals three. Or as Della puts it: “Our guys get to play with all the good toys.”

Shopping list CTP

• Starting price is around $100,000, but multiply that several times for a premium, fully automated unit in an A1 format.

• Are you replacing a standalone CTP setter, or also introducing/upgrading a vendor’s workflow product?

• Does your business have a legacy know-how of computer-to-film? Your ROI will be higher due to less training and a flatter learning curve.

• Are you upgrading to a more efficient production regime, or simply replacing an ageing setter? If the former, expect a higher yield on your capital spend.

• Don’t forget to factor in costs/benefits, such as automation features, imposition methods,
colour management, pre-flighting, plate technology, plate price, chemistry, processing equipment and processing time.

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