Mark Whelan, national product manager for plates at Fujifilm Australia said the Pro-T3 represents a full redesign, rather than a simple modification.

“We’ve redesigned three elements of the plate: there’s a new grain structure, a new undercoat layer, and the coating itself,” he said.

The new grain structure is an upgraded version of the manufacturer’s MultiGrain surface treatment, which Whelan said improved the ink water balance while also helping to maintain higher run lengths under aggressive print conditions.

Pro-T3’s undercoat layer incorporates Fuji’s Rapid Stable Startup technology, which is the glue between the coating and the substrate and helps achieve a quick and clean start-up.

The coating, uses new Fine Particle Dispersion (FPD) technology, is said to enable “dramatically” improve on-press performance, including a much wider tolerance of different press conditions, resulting in more stable, consistent developing of the plate on press.

According to Fujifilm, the plates have been tested extensively in Australia and will be released in early November.

Whelan said: “There are a number of variables on a press that could cause slow development. It could be the tack of the ink, it could be the roller settings, it could be how the press operator runs the press, so what we’ve tried to do is redesign the way the plate works to make it more forgiving to all the variables that you have on a press.

“That process of making the plate much more forgiving for the press operator will result in faster development on press, particularly when conditions on the press aren’t ideal. Whereas in the past the plate may have taken longer to develop out if the roller settings aren’t right, now it is a lot more forgiving to those variables.  Whether the press is set up perfectly or not, the operator should still achieve a quick and clean development process,” he said.

The rated run length for Pro-T3 remains unchanged from the previous iterations; however, Fujifilm said that the new plate would be priced “more competitively than in the past”. 

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