Jack Dean, area sales manager for Presstek Europe, gives his perspective on how environmental consideration can also deliver business benefits.
Presstek is quite a young company. We were founded in 1989 as a technology company and we invented certain technologies that at that time we sold to different companies to use in their machines.
We actually invented the first 100% chemistry-free plate. The other thing that we invented is DI technology.
Our mission statement is to ensure the success of the print providers by partnering with them for the highest quality with the final product while removing the complexities of chemistry.
In terms of production waste, with our devices we are not purely talking about chemistry waste, but there are other waste factors that we can save on.
Our high-quality chemistry-free plate range includes Aurora, an 830nm thermal CTP plate that can go into most imaging devices and completely get rid of all your chemistry.
All you need is a water wash and the plate can go in the press. Aurora is a limited run plate, with a maximum run length of 25,000, which fits into a lot of markets.
Anthem is an ablative plate – which again is just water washed with no chemistry – with a 100,000-run length, first-generation dot, sharp dot, 16 micron.
The third product – Zahara – is not just a chemistry-free plate but also water-less.
The plate market has been 95% owned by a company that is very well known for the use of chemistry plates. We have actually been winning quite a bit of that market by telling customers that they can continue to use the same imaging devices but we can give them better resolution and a sharper dock and get rid of all of their chemistry on the narrow web label presses.
We have just won a very large contract in Bulgaria for doing exactly that.
The other area where we are seeing growth in is CD printing. The main machine we look at is Cayman. Caymans use a very small plate and are water less. We have managed to win quite a big contract just recently in Poland for a company that actually does CD printing – onto the CD itself but also onto the covers of the CDs – and they do 250,000 a day on Codimac presses.
In chemistry-free CTP systems, we have thermal systems which is the 830nm CTP devices but we also now have inkjet systems. We developed a plate now that can go into any Epson printer on the market. It is an aluminium metal plate you can drop straight into your printer, needing no specialised inks.
With DI, you’ve got the advantages of direct imaging, which are quick turnaround, quick make-readies, less wastage, no chemistry – and it fits perfectly into a gap between digital printers and conventional presses, for 200-20,000 run lengths.