Dubai printer buys pre-press products

Dubai company Masar Printing and Publishing has bought Kodak pre-press products, including the Trendsetter News 200 thermal platesetter.

The printing arm of Dubai's Arab Media Group (AMG), it supplies a substantial slice of the UAE's contractual newspaper and commercial print jobs.

Masar purchased two fully automated Trendsetter News 200 thermal platesetters, fitted with Nela VCP Evolution plate bending and stacking systems.

With Kodak platesetters, the company expects to reduce process variation with accurate and consistent platemaking, reach target colour densities faster and with consistent imaging, and enable both heat-set and cold-set printing with high-quality Kodak Squarespot imaging technology.

Masar raised the bar even further by converting from AM to FM screening.

Samer Abdel Qader, pre-press manager at Masar, says: 'We were keen to introduce Kodak Staccato FM screening for newspaper print applications and thereby become the first newspaper printer in the region to print on heat-set as well as cold-set applications.

After a series of calibration tests, Masar successfully implemented 25-micron and 36-micron FM screening for heat-set and cold-set newspaper print applications, respectively.

'The issue with FM screening was that for many years print-minders had become used to AM screening technology for controlling ink-zoning manually,' says Abdel Qader.

'However, with the implementation of CIP3, they are now able to achieve the desired result on the substrate with minimal human intervention.

'Together with the use of Kodak Staccato screening, we can now get a much finer and well-controlled half-tone dot and reduce our ink consumption.

Masar automated and integrated its pre-press operations further by installing the full-option Kodak Newsmanager workflow system, so that the whole pre-press process of laying out, page paring, RIPing and platesetting could operate with maximum efficiency and reliability in an automated, hands-free environment.

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