Do it eight ways: The Purup-Eskofot DMX-2737 has an unusual eight-tray plate loading system that probably benefits commercial printers more than newspaper publishers.

The speed of computer-to-plate is in imaging, not the adoption

NEW ORLEANS -- Pagination is so far along in Europe that one U.S.-based supplier sold more than 50 computer-to-plate imaging devices in June at a trade show in Düsseldorf.

Not so on this side of the Big Pond, where CTP suppliers continue to ramp up for the inevitable day that American publishers have accelerated their pagination programs fast enough to justify the purchase of output devices that start at $140,000 and top out at about a half-million dollars each.

Until then, the suppliers' good stuff -- which got better over the last year, we've found -- isn't exactly racing off showroom floors into newspaper plants here and there and everywhere.

Some notable papers are taking a spin on the dance floor with the new technology, which is encouraging. The Boston Globe and Dallas Morning News are beta sites for Western Lithotech of St. Louis, Western Lith being the purveyor of the DiamondSetter, the industrial-strength behemoth that we likened last year to an armored personnel carrier.

The DiamondSetter is on the road again this year. We got a look under the hood to see silky-smooth mechanisms move plates into position, image them flat with a visible green laser, two pages side-by-side, and complete the function quickly enough to expose and process plates at the rate of 200 pages an hour at 1016 dpi.

Impressive performance in a $450,000 device that's had some minor tweaking in the last year to improve accessibility to electronics during maintenance. The structure's the same, with two imaging heads providing a built-in backup (if one fails, the other spins on) and speeding multiplate orders by imaging one page twice in one pass. Plates are fed automatically from bins that hold 200 pages -- your mileage may vary, but that sure sounds like an hour's worth of output.

Despite this voracious appetite, the DiamondSetter would choke on a doubletruck plate, which competitors point to as a problem that papers do have to take into consideration.

Another drawback: Only the DiamondPlate material -- made by Mitsubishi, Western Litho's parent -- is certified for use in the DiamondSetter, although approval of other plates is promised, with the likely consequence being the long-term reduction of prices. The Boston Globe reported getting 90,000 impressions from this plate with no noticeable wear -- a consequence of the fact this plate's substrate is the same as that of conventional plates.

In an age of downsizing, CTP technology stands up, out and all over -- suppliers will make their mark in the newspaper industry through sheer physical presence. While CPUs and disk drives have shrunk, and environmentally isolated computer rooms are being shuttered, CTP is the last line of defense against every department at a newspaper coming to look just like an insurance office.

Commercial efficiencies
Take Purup-Eskofot. This marriage of companies with complimentary technology -- Eskofot made scanners, Purup had output knowledge -- has produced a mammoth, well, modern sculpture with a footprint the envy of any Sasquatch.

The DMX-2737 is not quite in the same productivity class as the DiamondSetter. At 900 dpi, the Mendota Heights, Minn., company's internal drum can produce 52 plates an hour; at 1016, the rate dips to 48 plates. But multiple media are easily fed from an unusual eight-way plate loading system, allowing plates of several sizes to be loaded at once and drawn in as needed -- an efficient way to meet a mix of demands in a commercial shop, but perhaps more than any paper needs. (In fairness, we'll note that fewer than eight "loaderstations" may be ordered.)

Additions to another product, the Crescent 30/30 platesetter from Gerber Systems Corp. of South Windsor, Conn., make it an imposing, rounded-top structure as well. Shown this year were automated plateloading and processing devices, which feed single-page or doubletruck polyester or metal plates into the internal drum recorder, then extract them for processing at the rate of a plate a minute.

Adapting the $140,000 recorder, the center link in this three-part chain, to handle thermal plates requires $50,000 for a thermal laser, but the result is highly accurate replication -- to within one-half of 1/1000th of an inch.

Movin' them plates along was clearly the focus at Cymbolic Sciences, a newcomer last year who must have done some newspaper-specific marketing research to find that the Richmond, B.C., Canada, company's machine needed these improvements: Make it a SCSI device that can take input from other devices (especially multiple RIPs) into a 128 megabyte buffer so that one page can be ripped while one is being plotted -- and decompress files at plotting time to reduce the data flow from the RIP.

And control that data flow with a new product, PlateQ, which stores predefined plotting parameters for different presses and can be programmed to automate data transfer.

Plotting speed is the same as last year, which means that the Lexington Herald-Leader, Knight-Ridder's 125,000-circulation morning daily in eastern Kentucky and Cymbolic Science's first major newspaper site, bought a $140,000 NewsJet to be able to count on getting 65 manually-fed plates an hour.

Traditional suppliers eye CTP
Interest in CTP is "keen," according to the president of one long-time supplier, Monotype Systems Inc. of Rolling Meadows, Ill. Dennis Nierman said there "wasn't anything two years ago," and last year "imager sales suffered" as the industry awaited new offerings.

"Suppliers and materials were not there two years ago," Nierman said, so buyers "had to invest in large scanners, large drives and OPI systems of industrial grade" if they wanted CTP technology.

Monotype had such an offering last year, a multi-plate monster from Optronics with a sizable price tab. This year, the Futuro is front and center. An internal drum recorder that can handle doubletruck film or polyester plates -- and "that can convert, in some point in the future, into a platesetter" of chemical-free metal plates -- the Futuro was a smash at Imprinta '97, a trade show in early June in Düsseldorf, where Monotype recorded 54 Futuro orders.

Monotype also has advanced its ability to track jobs through the workflow, Nierman said, while proudly noting that his company's RIPs can handle Adobe's PostScript 3 with ease because they've been Adobe-based for four years. Thus, its line can take in portable document format (PDF) files and convert them to PostScript for output.

Nierman noted that his products can interface to Western Litho's DiamondSetter for those industrial-strength applications, as did executives at Autologic Information International of Thousand Oaks, Calif.

From their booth at NEXPO, AII executives demonstrated their integration capabilities -- they, too, can take in PDF files for conversion before output -- by sending RIPped files to the Western Litho booth for imaging.

AII doesn't manufacture CTP devices, but it has developed considerable experience integrating them into the workflow of 40 or so sites, all of them commercial printers, according to David Schrock, AII's marketing manager for imagers. "We're waiting for the pagination market to mature," he said, to leverage more sales to newspapers.

AII's key product, the industry favorite 3850 imagesetter, now used at more than 500 sites, has been modified slightly to allow faster throughput. A new option permits imaging to commence on film that has not been pulled and rewound, a step that was designed to eliminate stretch-induced errors; this saves 15 seconds per page, Schrock said, without sacrificing the precision registration for which the 3850 is known.

The 3850 now also can image the first length of film from a fresh canister, saving 28 inches of film -- and the space between pages has been shaved from three-quarters of an inch to one-eighth inch.

AII also showed off Apscom, a group of products to expedite full-page output. One nifty module, APS Bitmap Manager, takes in coordinates for multiple components, then imposes them on output, what AII calls "the late-binding integration of components from different sources." It can be used to pair pages that are sent as distinct files, merge multiple components into a single image, or double-burn layers of a page into a single image.

Another long-time imaging device supplier, ECRM of Tewksbury, Mass., introduced the Mako line of recorders, which can handle film or polyester plates, but not metal. An ECRM executive said the company was "moving slowly into CTP" with its AIR75, the Advanced Image Recorder.

The AIR75 uses a blue argon-ion laser to expose "most of the industry's currently-available digital metal plates" at a rate as fast as 74 doubletruck plates an hour. ECRM married it to a plate loader from K&F Printing Systems International of Granger, Ind., and ran demos at the K&F booth. Beta testing of the AIR75 is under way at an undisclosed U.S. site, with shipments planned in the fourth quarter of 1997.

Prepress Solutions of East Hanover, N.J., reported it has made minor enhancements to its CTP product, the Panther Fastrak, which was introduced at NEXPO '96 and also runs an Adobe-based PostScript 3 Rip. Autoload was added, so 60-plate-an-hour speed is assured, and doubletrucks can be imaged on plates as large as 24-by-36-inches.

Prepress Solutions also explained that its system used ultraviolet light to coat plates, instead of a gummy substance other processes use. The gum has to be "eroded off," and that takes paper on start-up; with Fastrak, such waste can be cut from 5 percent to as little as 1.5 percent, a PPS spokesman said.

Proof is in the proof
CTP puts added emphasis on color calibration and proofing, since an operator cannot hold up a negative for a visual check or to make a chromalith, and plate costs encourage keeping waste down.

Controlling color is the domain of Parascan Technologies of Sparks, Nev., which counts the Los Angeles Times as one of its major customers. Parascan's System Paravisual "reads" the bitmap data stream as it moves from RIP to recorder and -- this must be magic -- can interpret which part is an image.

The video data are used to produce a video image that's true to the goal, so press operators can use it to adjust inks -- which are set up for the run by the Parascan system, reducing the start-up effort to adjusting for registration, not color, and saving newsprint as the press starts to roll.

The trick to all this is calibration from front-end monitors to the pressroom monitors, using a hand-held device and a set of consistent look-up tables -- and a monitor at the press operator's desk whose controls are locked to prevent maladjustments to calibration.

Advances in the more conventional way of proofing pages -- on paper -- were shown at several booths. A notable newcomer is Tally of Kent, Wash., a 20-year-old company that decided to bring its variable-dot transfer color printer, the Spectra*Star T8050, to the newspaper market.

Driven by a Canon engine that is not otherwise marketed in the United States, Tally's printer resembles dye sublimation technology in that inks are merged with paper, but it uses porous media (coated paper, backlit film, canvas, glossy paper) and the ink is "fused" with the medium thermally. Because the dots it uses are variable -- up to 64 sizes -- the resulting proof is smoother, with 300 dpi output looking much sharper than expected.

While the Mac- or Windows-compliant device costs close to $12,000, an 11-by-17-inch page can be processed for $3.75, as opposed to about $8 for dye sub.

Jim Kelly & Associates of Wilkes Barre, Pa., brought along its new copy dot technology, the Dot-4-Dot 1300 scanner that can read camera-ready copy (negative or reflective), descreen it and then rescreen it for output. The $50,000 package runs on a Mac or Windows NT, and can handle doubletruck-width jobs.

And, finally, back at Gerber, we found a way to produce two-sided proofs accurately. While low-tech in its operation -- paper is manually fed, with several markers used to ensure alignment -- the IMpress uses an inkjet recorder and DuPont Dylux paper to image one side, then enable the job to be reinserted and aligned automatically to image the other side. (Registration front-to-back is within 20/1000 of an inch.)

Why, you ask? To be able to create the equivalent of a color blue line, or printer's final proof, which can be cut up and stitched to make a "comp" for final approval by a customer.

And that customer then can take a good look at the job and say, let it RIP -- right to the plate.

-- Pete Wetmore

Autologic Information International Inc.,
(805) 498-9611,
e-mail: rmedina@autoiii.com;
Cymbolic Sciences,
(604) 273-7730;
ECRM,
(508) 851-0207,
e-mail: bmcintosh@ECRM.com;
Gerber Systems Corp.,
(203) 644-1551;
Monotype Systems Inc.,
(847) 427-8800,
e-mail: keith@monoexpress.com;
Parascan Technologies Inc.,
(702) 358-6446,
e-mail: floydinman@sisna.com;
PrePRESS Solutions,
(201) 887-8000,
e-mail: info@prepress.pps.com;
Purup-Eskofot Inc.,
(612) 686-5600;
Tally Printer Corp.,
(206) 251-5558;
Western Lithotech,
(314) 225-5031.

From THE COLE PAPERS, July 1997, Copyright © 1997, All Rights Reserved.