At risk of boring readers I am once again going to write on the subject of CtP, and in particular the increasing importance of violet based CtP. If you have not read my writings on this subject before, violet-based CtP is visible light CtP using a violet diode as the imaging source. This is an alternative to thermal CtP that currently has the major share of the North American commercial CtP market.

In recent articles I have drawn attention to the situation that violet CtP is getting much better. This is because of improvements to the violet imaging diodes that are used, and this is brought about by the needs of the consumer electronics markets. Violet diodes are used in DVD readers and writers and in future more and more in games consoles. The diodes are increasing in power and reliability and maintaining their low costs.

Violet CtP devices, as compared with thermal systems, are lower in cost to manufacture and sell, more reliable, and less costly to run. They also can produce printing plates of a quality comparable to thermal devices.