Polyester Plates Allow College's Print To Thrive

Huntingdonshire Regional College has taken delivery of an A B Dick-branded DPM 34HSC polyester platesetter from Presstek Europe.

Huntingdonshire Regional College has taken delivery of an A B Dick-branded DPM 34HSC polyester platesetter from Presstek Europe.

The in-house reprographics unit prints stationery, business forms, leaflets and a range of teaching material for the college and produces printed material for external clients, the income from which goes to the college to benefit the 5,000 full time and part time students.

"The College recently had to take a decision whether to invest in new platemaking equipment or consider closing down the litho department and focus 100 per cent on digital copying," explained Paul Rourke, the college's print room manager.

"We were producing offset plates on an old CT system for our A B Dick 9810 press but, as technology moved on, it was becoming increasingly difficult to purchase CT plates and chemicals," he added.

Having undertaken an internal exercise to decide whether offset printing was financially viable, funds were made available to buy new platesetting equipment.

Rourke explained: "Although we don't produce large quantities of plates, we do print reasonably long runs on the A B Dick 9810.

This includes our two colour stationery, the Easter school and the summer school brochures.

Most of the short run requirements up to 1,000 copies are printed on our digital copiers." He looked at a variety of platemaking systems before recommending the A B Dick DPM 34HSC platesetter.

And he added: "Metal CTP systems were too expensive for our relatively small plate production and we didn't have the space to install a film imagesetter with conventional metal platemaking equipment.

The A B Dick DPM 34HSC platesetter is perfect for our requirements because it produces 330mm wide polyester plates, which fit our A B Dick 9810 press.

As well as being within our budget, the quality of the polyester plates is far superior to the CT plates.

In the past we had to outsource metal plates for the higher quality work, like the prospectus covers, but now we can do it all in-house.".

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