Some felt that processless, chemistry-free and low-chemistry plates weren’t hard wearing enough to cope with long run jobs. There was also a perception that the quality wasn’t up to scratch, that these plates could contaminate presses, and then there was the considerable price premium over conventional wet plates that needed to be factored into the equation.   

This combination of factors meant that initially adoption rates were slow. But over the ensuing decade or so the perception of this technology has undergone a major seachange. Plates are now harder wearing, meaning they’re more suitable for longer-run work. The quality has also improved enormously and the difference in price has narrowed significantly.

As a result, processless systems are considered more of a mature technology these days with adoption rates climbing across the board – from small commercial printers through to large long-run operations. 

But where do processless systems go from here? What are manufacturers of processless plates doing to ensure their products continue to eat into the market for conventional plates and what impact – if any – could the arrival of Far Eastern manufacturers entering the UK market have on established plate manufacturers?

If processless plate technology still seems relatively new, Nick Lazell, business development manager at Agfa, points out that it’s now 10 years since the company’s Azura product was launched and before that Agfa had a key role in supporting Heidelberg’s DI presses “so we’ve got 13 years of chemistry-free plate technology experience,” he says.

In that time the technology has come on leaps and bounds, according to Lazell, with processless systems being taken up by sectors that wouldn’t previously have considered touching it. 

“Short-run packaging customers are now using chemistry-free,” he explains. “And the major newspaper printers in the UK are chemistry-free. This technology is rapidly developing and we’re making things less complicated and easier for the end-user of the product.”

Lazell concedes that for the time being at least there are some print areas where processless systems still haven’t made much of a dent on the market.

“In the standard market and the high quality market there are no barriers to chemistry-free now, but for the larger web market, particularly with lower grade paper for magazines, and UV packaging printers, they still need harder wearing conventional plates.” 

New products

However, Lazell says that processless is one of the main areas of development for Agfa at the moment and the company is constantly looking to create new products that meet these needs.  

“We just announced the N95-VCF plate at IFRA, which pushes the boundaries for longer run lengths and has some UV running applications as well,” he adds.

In a similar vein, Kodak is also looking to develop new process-free products to meet the needs of those markets where the technology hasn’t as yet had much of an impact.

Adrian Shuttleworth, worldwide product manager – plates, in the print systems division at Kodak, says that the company’s process-free offer has come on in leaps and bounds in a short period of time.

“The technology has improved significantly so it will cover a much wider range of applications today, but there are still quite a lot of opportunities for improvements,” admits Shuttleworth. “Our Sonora product will go into most markets, but will it meet the highest demands in those market segments? Not yet. I think there are some areas like very long run-length publications and packaging applications like cartons that need very robust products and I don’t think that’s going to happen in the next couple of years. Is it going to happen in the next five years? It’s possible.”

Shuttleworth adds that Kodak isn’t “standing still” and is constantly working to improve the capabilities of its process-free products. As is Fujifilm, according to the company’s commercial solutions manager Sean Lane. He says that Fuji has a product roadmap for wet, chemistry-free and processless plates. 

“We’re very busy as we speak doing field tests of new versions of that [processless] product,” says Lane. “At the moment we continue to look at delivering improvements required for all three areas of plate development and that’s really being driven by the print market. Printer requirements change and as they change we have to re-align ourselves.”

To a large extent it was this shift in printer requirements that saw adoption rates of processless systems start to accelerate in the first instance. 

As environmental considerations increasingly came to the fore in the mid-2000s, plate manufacturers were quick to highlight the green benefits of processless. Then there were the potential cost savings associated with process-free that could be factored into the equation. 

For many printers the elimination of chemistry, reduction in water and electricity usage, the eradication of waste collection (and associated waste collection payments) and the chance to dispense with the chunky plate processor, was a combination of factors that proved too attractive for some businesses to resist – last year Kodak claimed printers could save as much as £60,000 by making the switch to process-free plates. 

The only hurdle they then needed to overcome, having made the decision to pursue the processless route, was getting their heads around the fact that the price per square metre for a processless plate was much more expensive than the square metre cost of a conventional plate. 

Falling cost

In the early days this cost equation was too much for some printers to stomach, even where they could see the financial benefits of making the shift to processless, but that price differential has slowly been whittled away, according to Fuji’s Lane.

“When processless was first adopted into the market there was a significant price premium for that technology and that was really due to the cost of manufacturing that needed to be taken into account when we sold the product,” he explains. “But as time has gone by and we’ve improved our manufacturing processes and efficiencies, we can now be much more competitive in the market and there has been a narrowing of price between processless and traditional processed plates.”        

Lane concedes that a premium does still exist in terms of plate prices – with some industry sources placing this premium at around 15%-20% – “but there are some significant savings printers can make in terms of the overall package so it would be wrong to assume that if you adopt that particular technology it’s going to be more expensive for your business,” he adds. 

The one thing that was expected to speed up the narrowing of the price differential was the arrival of a threatened wave of cheaper products from Chinese plate manufacturers in the wake of Drupa 2008. However, this scenario has so far failed to materialise.   

One manufacturing source says that in “terms of conventional plates Chinese manufacturers have had an impact – certainly in Asia where they are very strong as their products are really low cost”. 

But the source adds that they’ve struggled to gain a foothold in the UK and European markets, largely because they don’t offer the same level of back-up service and support of some of the long established platemaking manufacturers. 

And while the source concedes that when you compare the quality achieved by conventional plates there isn’t a great deal of difference to separate products sold by Far Eastern manufacturers versus plates from their western rivals, due largely to the fact that “run-of-the-mill print jobs can be done on pretty much any plate,” he adds that Chinese manufacturers in particular have struggled to develop processless products to an equivalent standard. 

Although for many printers the perceived price premium remains one of the main barriers to entry, Kodak’s Shuttleworth feels that another key hurdle surrounding wider market acceptance of the technology is an educational issue, with many companies not using process-free plates in the correct manner on press.

“People tend to get lazy and they fudge things on presses so that they can work the way that they like to work, but this leads to problems,” says Shuttleworth. 

“We get people who over damp the product to start it off on the misapprehension that you’re developing the plate on the press and you have to run the pre-damp for tens of revolutions, but that’s not the case. There’s an image formation on press, not a development on press. We need to get people to run the presses the way they should be run, but some people don’t really understand that.”

Another educational hurdle that needs to be overcome is lingering confusion surrounding the measurement of plates before putting them on press.  

“They don’t need to measure the plate before it goes to press, but they still have it in their mind that they must do that and trying to change them from that attitude is very difficult,” says Shuttleworth.

In the grand scheme of things these seem like fairly minor barriers. That’s why, in addition to working hard to develop new and even better processless plate technologies, plate manufacturers are also focusing more time and effort on the education side of things to ensure that some of the long-standing misconceptions surrounding process-free systems are eradicatated. 

Once these misconceptions are addressed it’s only a matter of time before processless reaches a tipping point in those industry sectors where take-up has been more sluggish to date.    

“As we’ve grown processless systems over the years there are some markets where it’s taken some time to become an accepted technology and then all of a sudden it can tip and it goes very quickly,” says Shuttleworth. “Once people start to see that this is a normal technology they’re more willing to go in that direction.”

Given the growing momentum behind processless plate systems, don’t bet against that tipping point happening soon.