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Technology Stocks : Presstek -- Stock of the Decade?? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: 90L43G6 who wrote (9804)	8/5/1998 4:56:00 PM
From: SG	Respond to of 11098

Dan, you say "sink to the current depths unless something is seriously wrong. ". I made and lost money in Cymer. It has 80% of the excimer lasers used by the top chip makers(Intel, IBM, AMD) in their steppers (Canon, SMLF?, etc.). To say that its products and the company are in trouble or that something is wrong is false. Yet look at the share price and you will see a company that is pouring money into R&D and staying ahead of the competition by doing so. The price is a reflection of the short term. PRST is only ten years old and does represent the risk/reward ratio that often comes along with this kind of company. Yes it is the victim of an unbelievable ride into the stratosphere, caused by projections that were , IMO, very early. There are also other issues that have not been kind to the shareholders including the un-impressive task of being first to file suit against those that wanted to "help" their short positions. PRST has a long list of "firsts" in an industry that has not had much change since the first Guttenberg. The industry is being dragged into the digital age by change. The continued expansion of the product line and the resulting spin-off of technology (4th generation laser, vacuum deposition technology, etc.) are not the signs that one would expect from a company in trouble. Expansion costs money and that dilutes the earnings in the short term. The Imation laser matchprint is a classic example of this level of technology. Set back after set back in the release of this product is the mark of a company that is committed to the 65% market share of the analog matchprint proof that they already maintain. The industry will speak loud and clear with the acceptance of the HDP proofer from PRST. The platesetter is also poised to capture a significant piece of that pie also. Look at the number of 1/2 size press houses in the U.S. and you will find a market ready for these machines. I believe that PRST is not in trouble at all. Many shareholders are, and I think that those who can stand the heat will be rewarded when these many products and alliances start to pour out of the pipe line. I look at the market price and see nothing but value at these levels. In my best informed and educated opinion of PRST SG

To: 90L43G6 who wrote (9804)	8/5/1998 10:32:00 PM
From: SG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11098

Dan, the whole CTP market is only about 3 years old. Given that short time frame it seems that PRST has made a lot of headway. From a Seybold report. <The CTP market really started in 1995, at the big Drupa trade show in Germany. It was stated at the time that there were probably more products working or shown on the exhibition floor than were actually working in production in the market worldwide. That is a slight exaggeration, but there were certainly a huge range of products, most of which didn't work. Most of these were targeted at the commercial marketplace for four- and eight-page formats. Let me just define what I mean. If I talk in this presentation of four-page and eight-page, or even sixteen-page format, I mean a platesetter that will image a printing plate for printing eight pages to view. For example, if you're printing on a Speedmaster 102 press, that's an eight-page-sized press. A Speedmaster 74 is a four-page-sized press. A Speedmaster 52 is a two-page sized press. So I'm using that definition in terms of size. The majority of machines being made today are for eight-page format. But the ones we saw at Drupa were predominantly four- and eight-page-sized machines. There were some larger format, sixteen-page machines, and some smaller format, but predominantly, we're talking four- and eight-page format. Most of the products that were shown at that time were conceptual products. They were not available. It was a way of putting a stake in the ground: we're in CTP, we know it's going to happen, we've got a product, and this is what we think it's going to look like. Some of the products were working. There were some that were actually being shipped. At that time, the majority of machines used one of two different types of laser. They either used an argon laser, which gives the blue light source, or they used what's called a frequency-doubled YAG laser, which gives a green light source. They are at slightly different wavelengths. The argon is 470 nm, and the frequency of the doubled YAG is 532 nm. The technology of the numbers don't mean much. The main thing is it's visible light lasers with blue or green light. At the same time at Drupa, a lot of new plates came about. Every one of the plate suppliers came out with CTP plates, if they hadn't already announced them. The other thing that came out at that show was the first real awareness in the marketplace of thermal plates and thermal plate-setting technology. This was the biggest spanner in the works for the take-off of the market, because all these companies had their new products imaging with visible light. But Creo, Kodak and Presstek were using thermal plates. I'm going to talk a lot about thermal plates later on, but basically it is a plate that uses heat, rather than light, to image it. The working beam is in the infrared spectrum, so you can't see it. It's a fundamentally different plate technology, and the majority of platesetters were not set up to do thermal technology. At the moment, the majority of platesetters that are shipping in the marketplace, are imaging with visible light, and visible light-based plates, rather than thermal plates. Current status of CTP. We have a market, particularly in North America, that's moving ahead very fast. This market started out with monochrome books and computer manuals. That sort of data was in computer-digitized form already, so computer manuals, which were largely single- and spot-color, were ideal for some of the early products for production. Business forms were another area that went fairly early, because the data was computerized. At Drupa, we saw the move to quality color. And what we're now seeing is medium and high-quality color printers rapidly implementing computer-to-plate systems. Particularly the large-scale magazine printers, who have almost wholly switched to computer-to-plate. In fact, if you want to get work from some of the big magazine publishers, you have to be computer-to-plate, and you have to be thermal. I'll discuss some reasons later on.>