Amar Ujala upgrades its pre-press with Kodak Trendsettter

07 December 2011

Publishing

Amar Ujala Publications, the publisher of one of the leading Hindi daily, Amar Ujala, upgraded its pre-press with Kodak plate setters.

The new platesetters are of size four-up and have been supplied by Delhi-based Insight Print Communications.

Pradeep A Unny, associate vice president, production for Amar Ujala Publicationssaid: "We opted for the thermal plates because of the affordable price and the comfort level with the thermal technology. This, backed with a good deal from Kodak prompted the buy for us."

The publication required 36 CTPs to feed their 106 four-colour towers located at 17 printing centres. The Printers House and Pressline are the main vendors for their printing towers. Currently, the publication company has 23 CTPs, including 15 from Kodak and 8 from Screen. The 17 centres collectively consume around 33,000 square meters of plates per month; most of which are supplied by TechNova and Kodak.

Unny added: "We are the only newspaper publication house in the northern part of the country to use thermal platesetters. Our Kodak platesetters can be upgraded any time from 70 plates an hour to around 200 plates an hour. The Screen CTPs run at a speed of 40 plates an hour."

The publication house has four products, namely flagship Hindi daily broadsheet, Amar Ujala; Hindi daily tabloid, Amar Ujala Compact, competitive and education Hindi monthly magazine Amar Ujala Safalata, and Amar Ujala Yuvan - the weekly tabloid for youth from Kanpur and Chandigarh.

With its strong presence in Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh, the publication house is planning a launch of ten more products within the newspaper and magazine industry in the coming year.

Apart from its own publication, Amar Ujala’s various print centres also cater to other prominent dailies. This includes job for the Hindi and English editions of Business Standard, the business daily broadsheet at Panchkula; The Pioneer, an English daily broadsheet and the Malayalam daily broadsheet, Mathrubhumi at Noida, among others. Its list of clientele also includes names of some competitive book’s publication houses such as Dhankar Publication and others.

The company employs more than 1,000 skilled people in the production front to run the printing facilities round the clock.