GYPSUM, Colo. - Colorado Mountain News Media, which prints five mountain dailies on Colorado’s Western slope and a number of commercial jobs, in July traded in its conventional YAG computer-to-plate technology in favor of violet.

The printer opted for two Advantage DL units from Agfa and was able to configure the platesetters into the space previously occupied by two alfaQuest Technologies CTP machines. The printer was also able to maintain its existing Nela VCP 2002 vision controlled bender, plate processor, stackers and conveyors.

In conjunction with the violet conversion, CMNM implemented Agfa’s Arkitex workflow for its daily products, the Glenwood Post-Independent, Summit Daily News, the Aspen Times, Vail Daily and the five-day-a-week Grand Junction Free Press, according to Plant Manager Jim Hemig.

Colorado Mountain News Media’s two new Agfa Advantage DL violet computer-to-plate units were configured into existing prepress space previously occupied by two YAG platesetters.
Photos: Tara McMeekin

“All of the papers go through Arkitex, pages are converted to PDFs, (Enfocus) PitStop Server flight checks pages and then they’re RIPped and page imposition puts them together and sends them out to the platesetter,” Hemig said.

Plates are organized in stackers by edition and manually hung on racks to go to the printer’s Dauphin Graphic Machines Inc. 440 press.  

Reflecting its moniker, the Advantage DL is a direct load platesetter.

“The imager and plateloader is all one unit and we have the same processors as before,” Hemig said of the Glunz & Jensen Interplater 85 units.

Cleaner, faster

Violet chemistry has been much cleaner than the previous plate chemistry, according to Hemig.

The new violet units are also faster than CMNM’s previous platesetters, imaging up to 63 plates an hour each - about 20 plates an hour faster than the old units, Hemig said. Because slipsheets are pulled from the front rather than the back of the platesetter, slipsheet removal accounts for some of the increased speed.

Rick Stansberry, commercial printing manager and Jeff Samsel, prepress operator, with CMNM’s network of computers in the prepress area. Left to right, Enfocus PitStop Server runs on a Macintosh G5; auto PDFing runs on bank of five eMacs/iMacs; the Arkitex workflow, shown on the first three of the flat panel monitors; GateKeeper for Macintosh, which sends PDFs to be RIPped; and finally, Agfa RIPDrives run on the two computers at far right.
Photo: Mike Agnese, CMNM

“The same suction that picks up the plate picks up the slipsheet and moves it over,” Hemig said.

The violet laser imager and its position inside the platesetter contribute to the speed of the unit as well.

“The platesetter moves the plate up and the laser is right there so as soon as the plate is imaged it goes to the conveyor, the conveyor gets it out of the way and clears the sensor,” Hemig explained. “When the first plate is done, the next one just starts right afterward. Moving the laser back increases the speed.”

The violet laser inside of one of the Advantage DL units at CMNM.




Right: Plates sit ready to go inside one of CMNM’s violet Advantage DL platesetters. Slipsheets are pulled from the front rather than the back of the platesetter for removal, thereby increasing the speed of the machines.

The ability to load balance between the two Advantage units increases speed as well as flexibility in plate production, Hemig said.

“When pages come in, they are routed to the available RIP,” he explained. “Both machines can be RIPping the same edition using both RIPs and when it queues the pages to send, it load balances - so you could have half of the Vail Daily going to one platesetter and half to the other without manually routing it.”

The Arkitex workflow generates barcodes on the plates that match up to the Nela bender for punch bending of the Agfa N91v plates. The app also generates CIP3 data for the press.

The speed of the CTP units has given CMNM’s production staff an additional 15 minutes on deadlines, Hemig said.

“We get a plate out and we’re on the press and running,” he said. “We can get our 15,000-copy press run done in under 25 minutes and our guys have been able to average 12 or 13 press runs in a 10-hour shift.”

Cost key

Hemig said CMNM had been eyeing violet and thermal technologies for the past couple of years but in the end, it came down to ROI.

“When we looked at new CTP, the cost of violet plates vs. the cost of thermal plates was low enough for us to ROI new units after four years,” he said.

Laser replacement cost also played a major role in the printer’s decision to go with violet. Because of the high volume of plates CMNM produces -  2,000 doubletrucks per month on average - the printer expects to get less than the expected life of three-to-five years from its laser.

“That’s one of the reasons we got rid of the YAG units, because those lasers are $25,000 and we went through a couple of those,” Hemig said. “This allows us to have some peace of mind that if we burn one of these (violet lasers) out, it’s a $5,000 bill rather than a $25,000 bill.”