Apex has teamed up with Chinese pre-press manufacturer Cron, which has launched a "major assault" on Europe and North America in a bid to break the oligopoly of Agfa, Fujifilm and Kodak.
Cron, which had an ill-fated partnership with Highwater Designs before launching its own direct sales company in the UK, HighWater CTP, is said to have dramatically improved the level of automation in its latest line of thermal and UV platesetters, the G series.
"They tried and failed to crack the European market three years ago with a product that didn't have much in the way of automation," said Usher, who added that Cron's new range had "everything you could ask for plus a bit more".
"They've got models from B3 up to VLF and all of them are available with three cassettes or one big cassette plus an autofeeder; the UV CTP can work in daylight so there's no need for a darkroom or coloured lighting; they have a precision-manufactured suction drum and a punching unit that will punch four sets of plates with an accuracy of 0.01mm," said Usher.
Plates are output onto a conveyor that will take them direct to a stacker for processless plates or to a Glunz & Jensen processor with a Cron automated replenishing system that monitors the pH and conductivity and adds fresh developer as required.
"Our first install has been running for over three months on the same chemistry," said Usher, adding that that was at a commercial printer running circa 20,000sqm of plates per year.
"We've got the plates running successfully in live installs, with no batch-to-batch issues, and we're talking about a saving of £1.50 to £2.00 per square metre over the gang of three," he added.
Cron makes a Blue plate for standard inks and a Red plate for UV inks, which are more aggressive towards the plate, although Usher said that even the regular Blue plate could print almost 35,000 impressions with UV ink. "We printed a run of 34,000 on the Blue plate with UV inks before we saw the 50% dot go below 40%," he said. "The Red plate will do a run of 250,000 to 300,000 on a UV press."
Apex has already taken orders for five Cron platesetters and installed three, in addition to the one in its Hemel Hempstead showroom, a 36in Cron UVP-3632GX, which will be demonstrated at its open house with IFS in March.
Apex is distributing both the thermal and UV platesetters, which are available in 26in, 36in, 46in and 72in sizes and will sell Cron's Blackwood UV plates, but not the equivalent thermal plate as it will continue to work with Fujifilm on this front. "We will continue to sell Fuji Thermal and Violet plates, but will sell Cron (Blackwood) UV plates to our new installations of Cron UV platesetters," said Usher.
All of Cron's CTP devices will connect to any workflow or RIP that can output a TIFF file.
Output speeds vary depending on the number of laser diodes the printer opts for. "The number of lasers can vary from 16 to 96 and in B2 size plate terms a 16 laser machine will image 14 plates per hour, whereas a 96 laser machine will image 56pph," said Usher.
Apex, which has also signed up to sell FFEI's RealPro workflow, will demonstrate the Cron UVP-3632GX platesetter at the Real Print and Finish open house from 10-12 March, with the plates being run live on a five-colour Ryobi 755G B2 LED-UV press.
"We're confident in the plates," said Usher. "If people want to come and print a job of 200,000 - as long as they supply the files and the paper we're happy to do that to demonstrate the durability of the plate."
The list price for the 36in platesetter plus processor, which will take three plate sizes – 510x400mm, 745x605mm and 920x640mm – is around £68,000.
