Application of CTP technology in China at present

Analysis on the application of CTP technology in China at the present stage

since drupa 1995, CTP technology has become one of the hottest topics in the printing field, and the professional word "CTP" has also appeared frequently in the printing media. Under the enthusiastic call of many technical experts and the rapid popularization of CTP equipment abroad, the domestic printing industry has also set off an upsurge of purchasing CTP equipment. However, its expensive investment cost and uneven effects after its application in various printing enterprises make us have to calm down and consider the scope of application of CTP technology at this stage, that is, in which printing enterprises can CTP technology be applied in a certain period of time to give full play to its greatest advantages. Advantages of CTP technology

compared with traditional plate making process, CTP technology has the following advantages: 1 The printing quality is good because CTP technology no longer uses film, but directly presents pictures and texts on the printing plate through light energy or heat energy. Therefore, the points on the printing plate are the points of direct one-time imaging, which eliminates the plate making defects caused by film factors and dust, and is cleaner and clearer than the points on the ordinary PS plate. At the same time, due to the reduction of processes, many variables in the plate making process are avoided, such as film development, exposure and chemical development drugs. This also greatly reduces the possibility of human errors in the process of plate making, and the stability is much better than that of ordinary PS version. In addition, CTP technology uses a more accurate plate positioning technology, which avoids the error of manual composition. The repeated positioning accuracy of the completed four-color plate can reach the micron level, and the brightness adjustment error in the printed matter can be almost ignored. It can be seen that CTP technology is bound to improve the printing quality. 2. Shorten the production cycle and save labor costs. The traditional plate making process takes 40 minutes from film discharge to plate printing, especially when the layout is relatively concentrated, the time is longer, and printing machines and other plates often appear. CTP technology can generally preview and collage the large version (collage the layout required by customers), and directly image on the plate through light energy or heat energy, so as to eliminate the processes such as photo discharge, manual collage, printing and so on. It takes only oneortwo minutes to assemble a set of folio four-color plates, and only about 10 minutes to output a set of four-color plates, which saves nearly 30 minutes compared with the traditional plate making process, and avoids the phenomenon of printing presses and other plates in the traditional plate making process. In addition, it can also greatly shorten the printing preparation time and the consumption of pre printed paper and ink. 3. It can carry out remote version transmission and realize on-demand printing. As a business tool, Internet connects the printing factory with customers and suppliers to complete the work of selling, distributing printed materials, managing printing production and ordering consumables. Now many printing plants have realized network connection and use e-mail for business contact. Some also set up their own pages. CTP technology fully adopts digital process flow, which provides convenient conditions for uploading version for remote printing. Moreover, CTP can realize "rip one time, multiple output", that is, once a rip interprets the file into vector format and forms a point array, the data can be stored on the hard disk and output many times, which is convenient and fast for remote version transmission, so as to realize on-demand printing. 4. The washless thermal plates used in the green plate making CTP technology can be operated in the open room without chemical washing. Compared with the traditional plate making process, developing drugs are no longer used, which avoids the production of toxic substances such as wastewater, protects the environment, and truly realizes green plate making

problems in the application of CTP in color printing plants

although CTP technology has many advantages over traditional plate making processes, the author believes that except for newspaper printing plants and other units that have high requirements for timeliness, the time is not ripe for general color printing plants to adopt CTP technology on a large scale. The main reasons are as follows: 1 The initial investment is high. At this stage, the quotation of each CTP equipment is between 1.6 million yuan and 2.4 million yuan. But the whole system is far from these costs. It also needs some related equipment, such as edge punching equipment, rip interface, etc. plus tariffs and value-added tax, 3million yuan is not enough for the whole system. The best traditional plate making equipment costs only more than 1million yuan, which shows that the price of CTP is about twice as high. 2. Expensive plates. The price of plates has always been the biggest bottleneck in the popularization of CTP technology. At present, CTP plate is about 88 ~ 96 yuan per square meter, and the newspaper page area is 0.44m2. Such a plate needs 40 yuan, plus 19% tariff and 17% value-added tax. A total of more than 60 yuan per page, and this is the price of batch. However, the imported PS version is generally 30 yuan, while the domestic PS version is only 20 yuan. Take Yangcheng Evening News as an example. 200000 plates need to be consumed a year. If one plate costs 40 yuan more, the cost of light plate will be increased every year. Haijunba, chairman of Mongolian Young Entrepreneurs Association, stressed that 8million yuan. This is a problem that many enterprises have to consider. Due to the increasingly fierce market competition, the plate making industry has become a low profit industry, increasing the plate making cost by 50%, which is unbearable for many enterprises. Even for users who have purchased CTP equipment now, not all live parts are output with CTP equipment, and the cost should be reduced as much as possible. At present, newspapers that have introduced CTP technology, such as Beijing, Wenhui Xinmin daily, liberation, Hubei, Zhejiang, etc., are all walking on two legs, and they use traditional plate making more often. The newly completed printing center of Yangcheng Evening News has no traditional plate making equipment and must adopt CTP plate making. Now the light plate material costs more than 20000 yuan a day. At present, few manufacturers can supply high-quality CTP plates, and almost all CTP plates used in China rely on imports. The supply channel is narrow, and batch supply cannot be formed in the market. Coupled with import tariffs, the plate price has been high. 3. Relevant supporting facilities, such as network, point copy scanning system, large version and proofing system, should be able to cooperate with CTP. The general principle is that all require digitization. 4. Talent problem in the traditional operation process, the output personnel only need to output the film, and then all the work will be completed by another department. However, CTP needs to make a large version of the information on the machine and make detailed settings in the output stage. At the same time, it requires closer cooperation with printing to obtain correct information. This requires clear who is in what position and what kind of instructions are correct, and it is difficult to form such a clear division of labor. After the introduction of CTP technology, the scope of knowledge must be extended to the printing level. In fact, few talents are proficient in all technical knowledge from typesetting to printing. Because CTP relies on digital workflow, the problem of talents will become more and more prominent. 5. The process is unstable. After years of formation, the process flow of electrical separation, Phototypesetting and plate making has been quite mature, and can make very excellent products. CTP technology is a new technology, and the process is still unstable. Problems such as point loss caused by operation during use are still unavoidable, so that the quality of the printed plate is not as high as that advertised by the media. The printing resistance of CTP printing plate still needs to be improved. Although the printing resistance of CTP was advertised to be as high as 200000 to 300000, this is not the case. In Zhongshan Zhongrong paper printing products Co., Ltd., the printing machine using CTP printing plate often stops waiting for the plate, because CTP printing plate often appears the pattern phenomenon after tens of thousands of printing, and sometimes it even appears this fault after only oneortwo thousand printing. The above points are important factors that restrict the large-scale introduction of CTP equipment by most printing enterprises. In addition, although some printing enterprises have installed CTP equipment, they have not tapped their potential. Similarly, take Zhongshan Zhongrong paper printing products Co., Ltd. as an example. The company's main business is to print the outer packaging of goods for P & G and other companies. Most of them are long version printing, and the printing quantity is often hundreds of thousands of copies, so the requirements for the printing plate's printing resistance are relatively high. In 2001, the company introduced a Cleo trendsetter. However, most of the company's customers provide film. Even if the customers bring electronic documents, it is also a long version list, and the requirements for delivery time are not strict. However, one of the main advantages of CTP is that it saves the link of outputting film to buy time for production, and one of the main disadvantages of CTP is that the printing resistance is relatively low. In fact, the more short version live parts, the more the advantages of CTP can be reflected. 2. The company has a fixed maintenance service department and professional maintenance engineers. In this way, the characteristics of its own production make the advantages of CTP unable to be reflected, An expensive equipment can only decorate the appearance. To sum up, the author believes that the large-scale use of CTP by general color printing plants still needs careful consideration

ctp's advantages in the newspaper industry

although the time for CTP to be used on a large scale in general color printing plants is not ripe, its successful use in the newspaper industry is obvious to all. Timeliness is our life. Newspaper printing requires that the printing time be shortened as far as possible to extend the deadline of newspapers. At present, the plate making speed of CTP equipment is constantly improving. It is understood that Agfa Polaris XdV, the fastest CTP equipment in the world, can output 350 quarto plates or 170 folio plates per hour. Therefore, using CTP plate making can buy a lot of time. After Yangcheng Evening News adopted CTP, the deadline was delayed by more than an hour, that is, it could grab more than an hour, and won good economic and social benefits. After the people's printing factory used CTP, the printing time was 20 minutes earlier than before. The Beijing Evening News, which used to start printing at 3:00 p.m., can now be printed at 2:40. In the printing industry of Europe, America and Japan, newspapers first introduced CTP technology, for no other reason, that is, the integrity of pre press materials of newspapers is easy to control. The newspaper office must complete a large number of pages in a relatively centralized time until the plate making is completed. All flexibility adjustments are limited to the time between the deadline and the machine printing. At present, a large number of newspapers continue to expand their editions, changing the Black Edition to the color edition, and changing the single-sided color to the double-sided color, which greatly increases the pressure on many newspapers that still use the traditional plate making process. Yangcheng Evening News is a successful example of the application of CTP technology in domestic newspapers. Yangcheng Evening News has more than 600 folio pages a day, and the workload of manual edition making is very large. The newly established printing center of Yangcheng Evening News is equipped with eight twin tower printing machines, which can print 1.2 million folio newspapers an hour. The eight machines need 512 folios to fill the pages in turn. Time is very urgent. At present, Yangcheng Evening News has a total of 6 Agfa CTP equipment, including 2 in the old factory and 4 in the new factory. A 10km optical cable has been laid between the old factory and the new factory. The transmission speed is very fast. Coupled with practical software design, CTP equipment can be controlled uniformly according to needs. In addition, the casting roller temperature of 170 ℃ will produce opaque semi crystalline film. The new plant uses tetra folio CTP, which is flexible in printing, and has two scanning heads. Each machine can produce 200 tetra folio plates per hour, which is very fast. In addition to the first version being a little slower, in the past, fire and other safety accidents occurred frequently due to the use of aluminum cables, and three tetra folio plates can be produced in one minute