Diss, UK, November 23, 2006 - In June this year, Nigel Bellamy, managing director of Shelley Printers Ltd, Leicester took the decision to replace his old Linotype Herkules filmsetter with a modern computer-to-plate (CtP) solution. He chose the RIPit SpeedSetter VM for the B3 format to make the plates for his two Heidelberg GTO 52 presses - one a two-color, the other a four-color. The shop's main work consists of mailers, four-color envelopes, stationery, but also brochures, flyers and books as well as many other commercial jobs. Nigel Bellamy's decision for the SpeedSetter VM was based on two factors - price and simplicity of operation. "The SpeedSetter VM is a very straightforward machine. The less complexity a machine has, the less can go wrong. It is very simple. We open the front, load the plate in by placing it against the stops in the drum, close the lid. The machine then images the plates and after it has finished we just open the lid again and retrieve the imaged plate. Straightforward and easy to use. In addition, the SpeedSetter VM images violet metal plates which meant that as the shop already has been using metal plates over the last decade, few settings at the press had to be changed. The installation in July by RSR took only four days and went very smoothly, the 53-year old founder of the company reports. No hitches were experienced and even the first jobs already showed the potential the SpeedSetter brings to the shop. "One of the first jobs we did was a 216-page book. Imaging the plates on our new CtP-device saved us a lot of time and all plates show crisp dots and far better quality than we had been achieving up to then." Since installation in July nothing has been the same at Shelley Printers. Nigel Bellamy and his four employees are experiencing savings, especially productivity and time savings and far less press downtime, he would not have thought possible before implementing the SpeedSetter VM. "Nowadays, the margins on print jobs are very tight. Tighter than in any time I can recall. Any improvement in productivity is beneficial. With the SpeedSetter VM we now use half the time we used to in order to make plates. This has an effect on the whole shop." "The quality of the plates is really great. Everything is fine, we now see sharper dots, cleaner images and the plates are exactly on register", reports Nigel Bellamy convincingly. "Our downtime on press is lower than when we were using conventional plates made from film. We are up and running in half the time. And there is nothing to correct on them. A real work and timesaver" With a resolution of up to 2540 dpi and a screen ruling of 200+ lpi, achieving a spot size of 10µm and a repeatability of twentyfive microns, the SpeedSetter VM fully satisfies the demands Shelley Printers have. Its maximum speed is 13 landscape plates per hour.