Printers who still process their plates or are considering making their own plates in-house can choose the smart decision to go process free with Kodak’s process-free plate portfolio. They will be joining over 3,000 printers across the world who have lowered their costs, increased their sustainability and simplified and streamlined their operations by doing so. Simply removing the processing step allowed printers to eliminate all processing chemistry and waste, reduce water and electricity usage, remove the packaging waste associated with processing chemistry, and of course, no processing equipment to continually clean, maintain, and ultimately dispose of. The economic benefits of process free plates just cannot be ignored any longer.
According to Kodak, Sonora XP process-free plates satisfy up to two-thirds of the world’s offset printing requirements, including the needs of sheetfed, heatset web, commercial coldset offset packaging and UV printers. They feature the run length, imaging speed, and print quality capabilities of mainstream processed plates. The plate is capable of run lengths up to 200K impressions on heatset and commercial coldest web presses, up to 100K impressions on sheetfed presses, up to 50K impressions for non-UV offset packaging applications. Kodak also offers a plate to fit the unique needs of newspaper printers, the Kodak Sonora News process-free plate.
Kodak recently launched availability of the Kodak Sonora UV process-free plate which expands the capability of Kodak’s process free plate portfolio to an even wider group of print service providers. The plates are capable of delivering longer run lengths for UV print applications than any other process-free plate – up to 30,000 impressions. The plates also allow printers to take advantage of both the environmental and economic benefits of process free plates and the expanded set of opportunities associated with UV technology, including flexibility, high print quality, and faster drying times.
A Sonora process-free plate user, Torsten Gröger, production director at cre art Die Werbeproduktion in Fulda, Germany says, “As far as we’re concerned, there’s no alternative to Kodak’s process free plates when it comes to UV printing. We simply don’t have room for a plate processor, and these plates have the general advantage of less effort and lower costs for plate making as well as more stability. Thanks to the Kodak Sonora UV process-free plate and the extensive capabilities of our press, which is equipped with numerous UV and print enhancement extras, we can produce complex and demanding jobs on any substrate. The level of creativity and quality is very high, and this kind of job would have been technically impossible a few years ago. These plates enable significantly longer run lengths with at least twice as many impressions as we get from the Sonora XP Plate.”
