Cheltenham, England - HighWater Designs, Ltd., a leading provider of precision engineered violet metal CtP solutions for small to medium size printers, announced today the release of the Cobra 8 NEWS, a high performance addition for the newspaper market to its line of violet metal CtP solutions.

The Cobra 8 NEWS features:

- Complete format range from 2-up (B3) to 8-up (B1) output

- High performance 30 plates per hour at 1270 dpi resolution

- High powered 120 mW violet laser diode technology

- Chemistry free ready

- Low energy use

- 3-year laser warranty/extendable to 5 years when used with HighWater Cascade™ consumables

- Fast, highly precise internal drum imaging

- User friendly point and click plate making

- Unique Barcode Plate Reader for plate identification and remakes

- PostScript Level 3  (Harlequin) RIP

- Prepress workflow solutions including the industry leading Quickflow RIP Manager to further enhance productivity including options for PDF creation and preflighting, trapping, imposition, proofing, ROOM proofing

HighWater’s CtP line includes the Cobra 2, a manual load-unload CtP engine designed specifically for the B3/2-up commercial print market; the Python, a 4-up (B2 format) manual load, automatic unload and the Cobra 8 (B1 format) manual load CtP solution. All HighWater CtP solutions expose violet metal plates at high resolution, using high precision internal drum imaging optics and a 120mW laser. Plates are placed directly into the drum by the operator with the Cobra systems, and located in the registration system. Vacuum is then applied to hold the plate in register while it is imaged.

The CtP solutions includes a 3-year laser warranty which HighWater will extend to a full five-year warranty when the customer utilises HighWater’s Cascade™ line of violet plates, chemistry and processors. This line of high-quality violet plates was designed to provide optimum performance when used in conjunction with the HighWater CtP solutions. Cascade plates are capable of 2-98% dot, a range exceeding the capabilities of most presses. The plates are bakeable and UV resistant and can be read with a densitometer for process control.
 
As new chemistry free plates are released into the marketplace, the HighWater CtP solutions are ready to accept these plates without any costly upgrades required by many other CtP devices on the market. Users of the Cascade system will find it easy to convert their Cascade processor to run chemistry free plates, therefore, providing the printer the security of a long term equipment investment.

For more information on HighWater’s CtP solutions visit www.highwater.co.uk.