Cheltenham, England – 14 May 2008 – HighWater Designs, Ltd., a leading provider for more than twenty years of precision engineered violet metal CtP solutions for small to medium size printers, announced today the release of the Cobra 2E, a new low cost, high quality B3 format violet CtP system to be demonstrated at drupa on Stand 9D26-9, Hall 9.

The Cobra 2E (B3 format) features:

- Single 120 mW violet laser technology

- Low energy use

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

- Fast and accurate internal drum imaging

- User friendly point and click plate making allowing anyone in the company to make a plate

- Chemistry free ready

- Unique Barcode Plate Reader for plate identification and remakes

- PostScript Level 3  (Harlequin) RIP

- Prepress workflow solutions to further enhance productivity including options for PDF creation and preflighting, trapping, imposition, proofing, ROOM proofing

The Cobra 2E is a manual load-unload CtP engine designed specifically for the B3/2-up commercial print market. It exposes violet metal plates at high resolution, using high precision internal drum imaging optics and a 120mW laser. The Cobra 2E joins HighWater's full array of B1 to B3 format CtP devices along with the Cobra 2 (B3 format) manual load, Cobra 8 (B1 format) manual load and Python, a 4-up (B2 format) manual load, semi-automatic unload CtP devices.

The plate is placed directly into the drum by the operator, and located in the registration system. Vacuum is then applied to hold the plate in register while it is imaged at a resolution of 2540 dpi (100 dpmm) at a speed of 6mm per second. A 2-up GTO plate takes only one and a half minutes to image, regardless of content.

The Cobra 2E 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. Printers have the advantage of receiving their support from one vendor, eliminating the need to contact different suppliers with technical questions related to plate making.

As new chemistry free plates are released into the marketplace, the Cobra 2E, along with all other 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.