900 Chemistry-Free Quality Plates A Month

A Presstek Dimension 400 platesetter with Compose workflow from A B Dick is producing up to 900 chemistry free plates a month at Masterange Business Services in Harlow (UK).

A Presstek Dimension 400 platesetter with Compose workflow from A B Dick is producing up to 900 chemistry free plates a month at Masterange Business Services in Harlow (UK).

The company offers its customer base a full service from artwork, four colour litho and digital print including variable data through to mailing and fulfilment.

To maximise productivity at the front end, the Dimension was installed, linked by 15 Macs and PCs with the Compose workflow with an Epson 7600 colour proofer for content proofing.

John Dolman, the works manager for Masterange, said: "We've been fairly cautious venturing in to CTP, simply because we had a watching brief on the market.

When we went to Drupa we visited the Presstek stand and realised the benefits of its chemistry-free process.

We decided to go this route due to the cost of chemicals and the new laws and expense for their disposal.

Although the Presstek plates are more expensive, the price is soon outweighed by the advantage of using them and the quality they produce." Masterange had been using a Linotronic imagesetter.

"It served us very well for many years but our customer base demanded a higher quality product.

We had to spend quite a lot of time cleaning up the conventional plates and there was no comparison with the plates that we can now produce on the Dimension.

The quality of the Anthem plates is second to none.

The dot is very sharp and the plates perform well on our 6 colour Roland 300 and the two, two colour Sakurai 225 perfectors," added Graham Griggs, Masterange's repro manager.

Griggs continued: "We did look at other systems before we placed the order with AB Dick.

The Dimension 400 has a very compact footprint and operates in normal daylight working, which were big selling points.

We also felt comfortable with A B Dick.

As well as being a big name and well established in the printing industry, they have a significant customer base of Dimension platesetters in the UK.

We didn't want to trail blaze a route that had not been tried and tested by others." Masterange visited two other Dimension users at Garden City Press in Letchworth and Perivan Financial in London.

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