In many ways CtP is not a major technology to see at drupa. CtP for offset is now a very mature technology in many areas and there are not a great degree of developments. I will be covering developments in offset CtP in a future post, but this time I want to look at an area where we are seeing real potential change in CtP for flexo printing.

Currently flexo CtP is reasonably well established in flexo trade shops and converters. The major supplier in this market is DuPont with its Cyrel plates. In this DuPont has a very successful partnership with EskoArtwork whose Cyrel Digital Imagers (CDI) are by far the largest selling products in the market. There are other suppliers of flexo CtP engines and plates such as Kodak and MacDermid but at this stage the substantial majority of digital flexo plates are from DuPont and are imaged on the EskoArtwork CDI imagers.

At drupa we are perhaps seeing a challenge to the dominance of DuPont and EskoArtwork with three new plates and associated imaging systems. EskoArtwork however is not sitting back on its laurels and is introducing the next development of CDI imagers that substantially increase the productivity and quality of flexo plate CtP.

The first new development has now been in the market for some months and this comes from Kodak The Kodak Flexcel NX plate and the Kodak Flexcel Digital Flexographic System is claimed to bring offset quality to flexographic printing. This technology is almost going back to computer to film. The Flexcel NX material is imaged on a Kodak Trendsetter NX CtP engine. This is basically the same as a Trendsetter offset CtP engine but with a debris extraction system. The platesetter can also image offset plates and this can be a benefit for shops with both offset and flexo printing. The outputted Flexcel NX imaging material looks like a piece of negative film. This is laminated onto the Flexcel NX flexo plate and is then conventionally exposed and developed on a UV lamp based exposure frame and plate processor. The plate is then mounted on the press. The plate has the potential of a very fine 10 micron spot and because the plate material has a very low oxygen content it is claimed to wearless on the press than other plates. Certainly the printed quality I have seen looks very good.

The second new development comes from the second largest supplier of flexo plates, this being MacDermid. They have developed a new flexo plate that has a much higher sensitivity that other flexo plates. Macdermid has teamed up with Swiss CtP supplier Lüscher to use the Lüscher conventional plate CtP device that uses a large number of violet diodes to image conventional UV offset plates. This device has sufficient imaging power to directly image the new MacDermid plate. This is a real breakthrough and can be defined as flexo CtCP (Computer to Conventional Plate). Unlike other plates used today in flexo CtP where there is a two stage imaging process that first has the laser ablate away a carbon layer, and then a second process in a separate unit where the plate is flood exposed to a UV source to image the areas exposed by ablating away masked areas of the plate. At this time the new MacDermid plate is not available and is still in test but if it works at a reasonable speed this could fundamentally change commercial flexo CtP. MacDermid also works with a different one of its plates in thissingle exposure fashion for newspapers using a newspaper CtCP engine from BasysPrint. MacDermid outlined to me that they anticipated bring this new commercial flexo plate to market in early 2009.

The third new technology is coming from Fujifilm and their first product for the flexo plate market. In fact it is not a product yet as it is probably two years from coming to market. This new plate does not use image or plate exposure but plate engraving. In this a very high power infrared laser will blast away (engrave) the non image areas of the plate. Now laser engraving of flexo plates is a well known technology and there are a number of suppliers with systems for this application. Up to now such technology is for lower quality non process color applications. Fujifilm claim their technology is of a much higher quality and suitable for high-quality color applications. So far it is all theory and promise and only photographic samples of how the plate will look were shown together with a piece of the plate. This is a long-term solution however it is interesting to see Fujifilm focusing on this area.

As I stated before EskoArtwork and DuPont are not sitting back but are further developing their approach to flexo CtP. At drupa they finally launched their new approach where both the mask ablation and the UV plate exposure are carried out at the same time just leaving the final plate processing to be carried out n the plate processor. The new EskoArtwork engine will image the mask area with its high power multi-beam infrared laser engine and remove the ablated mask material by vacuum. A UV light source will then image this exposed area of plate. When the whole area of the plate has been imaged the plate is moved into a second area of the platesetter where the whole rear side of the plate is flood exposed by a UV light source. This hardens the whole area of the plate making is safe from damage. The plate is then transferred to the DuPont plate processor. This new approach drastically improves the total time to image a plate as well as reducing the chance of damage to the plate before it is imaged and hardened by UV exposure. This can be seen in the throughput times for the product where three 50 x 80 inch plates can be imaged and finished each hour.

These technologies should enhance the role of flexo printing in challenging offset in more areas of packaging and other print applications. It is a healthy sign for the flexo market that so much technology development is being focused on improving this market.