(Speaking of imagesetters: AII of Thousand Oaks, Calif., had on display its 3850 SST, a turbocharged version -- complete with flame decals on the side -- of its popular 3850 internal punch imagesetter, itself a major trendsetter three years ago.

(Now capable of spitting out 70 inches of film a minute, the 3850 SST can output a four-color sep in about 80 seconds. One hangup: AII admitted that only a processor from LogEtronics Corp. of Springfield, Va., can keep up with this rapid throughput.)

To shoppers not wedded to conventional imaging steps, CTP suppliers could make two pitches at once:

To that end, Eskofot Digital Graphic Systems Inc. of Doylestown, Pa., commissioned an independent study of CTP ROI (you remember return on investment -- it's how you used to justify annual capital expenditures before they became a monthly budget item).

The study found that by using Eskofot's DPX-420 -- a machine geared to short-run jobs, generating 20 to 25 plates an hour -- to produce only half the needed metal plates, each CTP plate would be $3.48 less in total direct costs. And after a three-year payment period, the savings would jump again.

What set one machine apart from the others? A key difference was in how the medium -- metal or polyester -- was fed and imaged.

Some devices, such as Eskofot's, used an arc-shaped bed on which the plate rested while a laser and mirror were carried back and forth across the bed, spraying dots as they went.

A more prevalent design was internal drum, in which the plate was bent the opposite direction from that on the press, locked in place by either vacuum or lock downs, and again imaged by a moving laser/mirror assembly.

One advantage CTP has over imagesetters is in this lockdown mode for imaging. A capstan-driven imagesetter, it's worth noting, occasionally may suffer a loss of data while steadily advancing the negative, leaving a blank band in the film. The odds of this are reduced in internal drum devices, as the imaging apparatus can be held in place pending delivery of new data.

One truly new device at NEXPO was on the fringe of CTP. A Canadian company, Elcorsy, of St-Laurent, Quebec, brought the first plateless press to NEXPO and introduced a new term: Elcography. Using an electro-chemical reaction dubbed "electro-coagulation printing," the Elcorsy could put down a new image with each turn of its cylinder.

Elcography measures output not in impressions per hour, but feet per minute -- currently 200 fpm, but "theoretically" 3000 fpm. (Now there's a nifty dodge when trying to find ROI for this gadget -- can you convert IPH to FPM in your shop?)

While Elcography on newsprint was fuzzy at best -- somehow 200 dpi doesn't cut it -- output to other media was quite good, making the Elcorsy a candidate for not only CTP, but the proofing desk as well.

Proofing? This was an area suppliers had targeted anew, sensing the growing demand for many kinds of color proofs, from the quick-and-dirty newsroom rendering (some smudging allowed) to the high-resolution, customer-pleasing glossy proof for advertisers, who have flocked to buy color at papers big and small.

And then there's the press foreman, who'd like to have some idea of what the color pages are supposed to look like.

While the technology for proofing is hardly cutting edge -- water-based ink has been spurting through jets for years -- exhibitors took fresh delight in displaying the ease with which consistent color could be output. A machine of choice in several booths was Hewlett-Packard's DesignJet 755 HC.

Shunning water ink was Polaroid Corp. of Cambridge, Mass. Its Dryjet solid ink jet device uses melted wax to (slowly) produce vibrant, high resolution proofs. Really pretty, not cheap: $34,500 for the machine, about $2.50 per page.

Oyo Instruments of Down Under, with U.S. offices in Houston, Texas, promoted a device that turned out first rate glossies that would satisfy any advertiser, and could reasonably be used in a press room to gauge color accuracy while an edition was on the run.

(Oyo also displayed its dry thermal process direct-to-polyester-plate devices, the Endeavor and the Liberator, which featured a screen generator -- eyeball this guide, find the tonal range you desire, enter a single number and poof! It's calibrated, and set to send out chemistry-free plates at 0.2 inches a second for about a buck a foot.)

Two suppliers offer photo-based proofing devices, in which negatives are exposed one separation at a time to produce a reflective proof. Konica Imaging U.S.A. Inc. of Glen Cove, N.Y., said it has marketed its machine for a number of years, primarily to commercial shops.

Joining Konica is Falcon Technologies of Maple Grove, Minn., whose Talon One system can generate a photo proof it claims to be as good as a matchprint at a savings of $17 or more per item.

Advantage? More accurate color rendition than a digital proof. Disadvantage? Not as fast as a digital output device, and more labor intensive. But these machines are here to take the place of matchprints and color keys, and save a bundle in the process.

Computer-to-plate technology has a baseline low -- manual feed, as few as eight pages an hour -- to high-speed, multiplate behemoths that can churn out four plates in a minute.

Migration to the newspaper industry was evident by speed -- a page every two-to-eight minutes -- as exemplified by the commercial printer-pleasing Gerber device being marketed by Pitman Co. of Totowa, N.J., to the dumbed-down machine at Cymbolic Sciences of Los Angeles, which brought its product to the newspaper world from the land of circuit board manufacturing.

Cymbolic in effect "detuned" to 1000 dpi a machine designed to produce an image at 16,000 dpi. At 40 seconds a page, this $170,000 assemblage (RIP included) could meet some newspapers' workflow needs, especially since it also can produce negatives, but it does require a pair of hands to keep it fed -- not a step up the ROI ladder away from a labor-intensive plate room.

At the other end of the spectrum were devices at Western Lithotech of St. Louis and Optronics of Chelmsford, Mass.

Western's DiamondSetter looked like the above-mentioned wheelless personnel carrier, an imposing structure taller and wider than this correspondent (which is saying something). Designed for commercial printers, the DiamondSetter could meet newspaper demand with throughput of nearly three pages a minute`.

In the same league was Optronics' PlateExpress XL, which was on display in the Monotype booth. A high-end external drum device, the PlateExpress XL can feed several sizes of plates from separate feed bins. When it gets rolling, it can image a plate a minute while holding four plates at once (double trucks a specialty).

Thus, Optronics vies with Western for multi-plate processing. At the other end of the productivity spectrum was a device made by Printware Inc. of St. Paul, Minn. Also being shown at Monotype, this $150,000 device will produce Printware-only plates for $1.55 a square foot which it claims are good for 100,000 impressions.

(Some showgoers disputed this notion, pointing to pages in the Las Vegas Review-Journal that were printed with Printware plates that they judged less than adequate.)

Finally, competing for the up-and-coming CTP award is Prepress Solutions of East Hanover, N.J., whose gadget has a single flatbed imaging area fed by four RIPs -- thus, no waiting for a page to be RIPed, so it shoots through a 24-by-36 inch page in a minute.

Also, Prepress offers an Intranet-based RIP monger, using Netscape Navigator as its browser, that will take RIPped data and store it for additional output, if needed, or feed it to multiple devices, such as a proofer that then would render the same image characteristics as the plate would.

Is direct-to-plate a reality? For some applications, definitely. Is the new era of filmless production here? Not hardly -- but check back next year, and two years from now for sure, as pagination becomes even more widespread.

At that point, the continuing demand to save money somewhere, somehow, likely will lead the bean counters to the big room with the noisy behemoth that actually puts ink on paper.

And then CTP likely will find many a home.

-- Pete Wetmore

Autologic Information International Inc.,
(805) 498-9611;
Elcorsy Inc.,
(514) 337-6573;
Eskofot Digital Graphic Systems Inc.,
(215) 766-0908;
Falcon Technologies Inc.,
(612) 425-0646;
Konica Imaging U.S.A. Inc.,
(516) 674-2500;
Monotype Systems Inc.,
(847) 427-8800;
Optronics,
(508) 256-4511;
Oyo Instruments Inc.,
(713) 937-5800;
Pitman Co.,
(201) 812-0400;
PrePRESS Solutions,
(201) 887-8000;
Western Lithotech,
(800) 325-3310.

From THE COLE PAPERS, July 1996, Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved.