Paul, I have some comments on your post referring to the Dotprint feature article on thermal vs. so-called visible light plates. First thing I did after reading it was to check the date - it is over a year old! That would explain a number of the screwy positions the author took:
Printing World, August 19, 1996
SEEING THE LIGHT
"But although the plates might be available, the hardware is not. The plate suppliers and hardware manufacturers are stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation: nobody's going to launch hardware while the plates are not available, but there is no demand for the plates until the hardware is out there."
Paul, at this point there are a slew of equipment manufacturers who support thermal plates, including Creo, Gerber, Krause, Optronics, Scitex, Scangraphics and of course, Presstek.
"One reason is that until Polychrome has got its thermal plate up and running, there is just one thermal supplier, Kodak."
Paul, The omission of Presstek here is presumably due to the fact that their most popular plate being used at that time was a waterless plate, not a plate for wet offset printing. Although, that is only a partial explanation, since at the time of the article there was a first generation wet offset plate, PEARLwet, available for Presstek equipment sites. I think the author didn't do his homework here.
"Another reason for the limited extent of the thermal user base is the fact that while Kodak's plate has been the only one available, it offers no real advantage over a visible light plate. One of the main benefits of thermal is perceived to be its processless operation: in otherwords, there1s no need to develop and fix it. Kodak's plate, unfortunately, demands processing. However, the fact that it needs processing at all puts it on a par with visible light plates, and rules out a part of the perceived advantage of thermal. Likewise its daylight-handling capabilities - Kodak's plate needs a darkroom, and although this won't be a problem for the majority of printers, again this is a perceived benefit of thermal which the Kodak plate just does not offer. And then there is the issue of baking. A thermal plate needs to be baked to give a run length on a par with the unbaked run length of a visible light plate. Vision says that Kodak is working towards a thermal plate which does not need to be baked.
Paul, all of the above NEGATIVE factors on the Kodak thermal plate are exactly why the PEARLgold will be so much more successful once it is released: no darkroom required, no baking, no processing of any kind.
This artical is a great example of an attempt to discredit Presstek without having any knowledge of the industry, so Paul, you like other shorts, fall victim to a poorly written, inaccurate, over-one-year-old story, to try to support your point of view.
Neil |
