Multi-award winning regional newspaper, The Courier, has installed a fully-digital Agfa :Advantage XS violet computer-to-plate system to complement its recent investment in two Tensor high towers at its South Australian printing facility.
With the increased efficiency and automation gained from the new equipment, the newspaper expects to increase its full-colour production, something production manager Steve Marston says was not achievable with the previous analogue system. He says, "CTP has knocked off a couple of hours a night. Before, once the film
was out it had to be exposed with UV light, then the plate processed. Now it's all done in two and a half minutes. It saves time making plates and you're not paying for film so there are cost savings. It also produces a sharper dot so the print quality is much better."
Marston continues, "Since we put in the CTP we can do more full colour work. If we still had the old system we would spend all night making plates. Now we just need one person to operate all of it. It's simple to use. Once the pages are ripped, [the :Arkitex workflow system] puts them together. You just have to approve it. Anyone can use it."
The Courier delivers 15,000 copies weekly throughout the Adelaide Hills. It was first published in 1880 and is still privately owned and operated. The Marston family's association now covers four generations. It has been South Australia's 'best country newspaper' twenty times and achieved the Country Press Association's 'best
newspaper in Australia' status for the third time in 2007.
Around 70 plates are required every week with 95 per cent produced for the GossCommunity web press (plate size is 889mm x 586mm). In 2006 the first Tensor T1400 tower was installed to expand press capacity and a similar tower added in August this year.
The Agfa CTP system installed comprises an :Advantage XS violet platesetter with online VPP68 processor imaging :N91V photopolymer plates. It features manual plate loading, multiple resolutions ( dpi) and Agfa's patented 3-point FleX
registration system. An :Arkitex RIPDrive workflow with Pair/Imposition modules provides automatic page pairing and imposition adjustments.
"Having CTP is one of the big pluses for us," says Bruce Marston, The Courier's manager. "With the new printing towers, they all complement each other."
Besides its 20-year association with Agfa, Bruce says the :Advantage XS guaranteed the ideal plate capacity and, because auto-loading was unnecessary, offered the best pricing. It also leaves open an easy upgrade path to chemistry-free processing in the future.
