Newsday in Long Island, N.Y., and The (Baltimore) Sun are rolling out violet computer-to-plate systems from Agfa as Tribune Publishing Co. commits to the prepress technology.

Both newspapers are in the final phases of deploying the CTP equipment. The Sun’s installation was scheduled for completion at the end of December, while Newsday will wrap its project this month.

The Sun (daily, 236,172; Sunday, 380,701) is installing three Advantage DL 160 units and Agfa’s Arkitex workflow software, according to Production Director John Frahm.

Each of the units is capable of producing up to 140 plates per hour at 1,270 dots per inch.

The (Baltimore) Sun’s prepress production staff poses in front of one of the paper’s new Glunz & Jensen K&F plate benders. The paper’s migration to CTP was completed last month.
Photo: The Sun

“Just like other newspapers installing CTP, we’re looking to have a light’s out operation and get rid of traditional platemaking,” Frahm said. “Through edition planning and plate sortation, we’re able to reduce cycle time so that we can start the presses 10 to 15 minutes earlier,” he said.

Glunz & Jensen K&F Inc. supplied The Sun’s two new optical benders and plate sortation system. The new benders will work with an existing K&F optical bender that was previously used with The Sun’s Autologic 3850 filmsetters.

Newsday chooses Polaris

Although Newsday and The Sun both chose violet, Newsday opted for Polaris units because of the volume of plates the machines can image - up to 221 per hour, per unit, according to Alan Abramson, production manager and manager of Newsday’s CTP project.

When Newsday caps off its installation, the newspaper (daily, 410,579; Sunday, 474,750) will have installed four Polaris XTVS units.

Newsday’s four Polaris CTP units send plates to punch benders from Burgess Industries. Plates are sorted by press.
Photo: Newsday
 

“The driver for choosing Polaris was throughput,” Abramson said. “We run a lot of plates here at Newsday,” roughly 23,000 per week (The Sun estimated its plate output at approximately 9,000 per week). In addition to its daily, Newsday prints a handful of other publications, including A.M. New York and Village Voice Weekly. The Sun, meantime, prints its daily along with an edition of the New York Post.

Newsday will keep its alfaQuest Technologies front-end system in concert with Agfa’s Newsdrive to drive the Polaris systems, Abramson said.

“We just needed to do a few upgrades to our systems so the alfaQuest software would integrate with Newsdrive,” Abramson said. That integration has gone well, he said.

“It’s been flawless; there’s been no hiccup with any of it,” he said.

Burgess Industries Inc. supplied four plate benders for Newsday - one dedicated to each Polaris unit - and a plate sortation system to sort plates by press.

Extensive research

Both dailies extensively researched CTP, with Newsday’s study beginning more than six years ago.

“We’ve both been exploring CTP for quite awhile,” Frahm said. “About a year and a half ago, we began in earnest.”

The papers’ evaluation included putting together a list of questions for perspective suppliers and having each vendor complete a CTP brief, or white paper.

“It covered everything from hard statistics on reliability to having vendors back up their claims of quality advantages as far as violet versus thermal and thermal versus violet,” Frahm said.

Newsday’s research included site visits to Detroit Newspapers and the Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal, and Sun production personnel visited the Indianapolis Star and the Asbury Park (N.J.) Press.

“One of the Advantage DL users we probably revisited six times over the course of a year because we wanted to talk to end users and folks that live with it every day,” Frahm said. “Simplicity and reliability were very important to us - that helped us validate the claims (of vendors).”

Newsday will not retain any film backup when installation is complete, while Frahm said The Sun will keep one of its filmsetters on-line.

“That is more for business continuity,” he said. “It has nothing to do with lack of confidence in the CTP equipment.”

Each of the newspapers tapped Hart Industries’ Metafix for consumables and waste disposal.