SEM Envelopes switches to PRO-T
Specialist envelope manufacturer SEM has switched to processless CTP with Brillia HD PRO-T plates, dramatically boosting productivity and quality while improving environmental performance.
Operating a 24-hour shift from Monday morning to Friday evening each week, SEM Envelope Manufacturing employs some 40 people at its Derby premises, producing bespoke envelopes for a variety of blue chip customers. Both sheet-fed offset litho and roll-fed flexo presses are used to provide a wide range of tailored products, often running five colours plus coating. Typical run lengths on the B1 press are between 2,000 and 25,000 sheets, but exceptional jobs can run up to three-and-a-half million finished envelopes.
A move in autumn 2006 from premises in Nottingham to a new site in Spondon gave the company the opportunity to reappraise and upgrade its entire offset production capability, from prepress through to printing. A new five-colour Komori S40 with inline coating and drying took care of the latter, while a film-based workflow using Fuji's VPS conventional plates was replaced with a Kodak Lotem 800 platesetter running Fuji's Brillia HD PRO-T processless plates.
"We tested a competitor's processless plate, but found that it didn't last as long on press, running only to about 50,000 impressions," comments repro manager Richard Evans. "It was also slow to expose at about seven plates per hour, while we get 15 to 20 per hour using PRO-T. We've had runs of well over 100,000 with PRO-T and, in one case, more than 170,000.
"We have been a Fuji plate customer for many years, and although we have the Fuji plate support phone number, we've never had to call it," he adds.
Space race
The reliability of Fuji plates wasn't the only factor driving the move towards processless CTP. As Evans explains: "We had been looking into CTP since the summer of 2005 but a platesetter with online processor was going to be 8.4 metres long and the prepress room at the Spondon site was only 10.5 metres, which didn't leave enough room to load and unload. When our dealer Pageant Graphics told us about the forthcoming processless plate from Fuji, we knew that was the answer.
"The beauty of processless is the small footprint, it's amazing how much space we've saved. The prepress studio is much less messy, there's less traffic through it and you get to go home without your hands smelling of developer," he adds. "It's also not a problem if a plate breaks, the pressman can output a new one by pressing two buttons, and he hasn't even got to develop it to get it on the press.
"With PRO-T we get much better quality because we have complete digital control - there are no chemicals, dust or fading UV lamps to affect the quality of the plates, and once the plate's on the press there's nothing left behind to clean up. By moving to processless CTP with PRO-T we've increased our productivity enormously."
SEM prepress staff and press minders have found that PRO-T plates have good image visibility, important for positive identification when many envelope designs have very little ink on them. Getting enough plates to meet the workload hasn't been an issue either: "The supply via Pageant Graphics is brilliant and we're very pleased with the technical support we've received," says Evans.
