Vandalia, OH (USA), February, 2006 - Esko, the market leader in packaging pre-production solutions and world leader in digital imaging of flexo plates, announces that Mark/Trèce has purchased and installed a Cyrel Digital Imager (CDI) Advance 5080. Mark/Trèce offers its customers platemaking and pre-press, total concept development including graphic design, print quality consulting, and a variety of other value added services from its eleven operations in the US and Caribbean. Last year, Mark/Tréce decided to pursue CtP with the intent of finding a device that would be cost-effective for corrugated. The company knew that for jobs other than corrugated, quality drove demand for digital plates. But, for them, the greater motivation was the opportunity to eliminate a step in the process with a filmless, higher-quality plate. Ultimately Mark/Trèce chose the CDI Advance 5080 based on feedback from other users and with help from the Pitman Company. Reliability was the key and there were enough CDI installs to know it worked successfully elsewhere. With the CDI Advance 5080, Mark/Trèce now has greater flexibility. "With the CDI Advance 5080, we now have the best of both worlds-the ability to produce high quality digital plates-for large, corrugated jobs. We recently sold three jobs that were 6-color corrugated. We couldn't have completed the job without stripping. The availability of large format imagesetters and technology is quickly disappearing. The CDI Advance gave us the ability to go direct to very large plates," notes Bob Dauses, Mark/Tréce-Corporate Marketing Manager. Before, Mark/Trèce often had to produce two or more films for each plate. On large, corrugated plates, they are now 15% faster because they removed that step. They also eliminated the requirement to occasionally go outside for film and stripping. For example, sometimes they need to produce large one-color plates for a consumer products company, with images and screens running though the entire job. "It seems easy, but the plates are 46"x75". If you do not image one piece of film, it is hard to strip them together, because it requires tremendous skill to match the films," explains Dauses. "We eliminated that whole process. Now we can produce multi-color jobs-all which would have required a tremendous amount of film and stripping -digitally without a hitch. Once we learned how to gang up jobs, we saved a lot of time. We get a better job, quicker." Mark/Trèce also likes the quality of the plate. In particular, the structure of the very small dots- the ability to expose, image and print very small dots-makes it easier to print exceptional work. "We're very pleased in the way Esko and Pitman, our reseller, took care of everything. That's what we expect from our vendors. Scheduling and the other logistics can be complicated. They were a big help," summarizes Dauses. "The Esko CDI Advance 5080 platesetter is an excellent piece of equipment and has done what we expected it to do; but more so, I think it is becoming a necessity to stay competitive in this business."