The two companies have entered into a joint marketing agreement for the new Aluva plates, although Agfa UK managing director Laurence Roberts stressed that Agfa was not supporting the sale of Lüscher's platesetter range.

He said: "There's a market for these plates, so we might as well make them and sell them. It doesn't mean we are going out with Lüscher to help sell their platesetters in the UK – absolutely not.

"We're not supporting the selling of the hardware but where the hardware is sold, we might just as well run our plates on the hardware and get a chunk of that business."

Lüscher has accredited both the positive and negative working plates, Aluva P and Aluva N, for use with the XPose! UV, which was launched in February 2007.

Kurt Steidle, board member at Lüscher, said: "Having a plate explicitly designed to support this technology, we see as a tremendous benefit."

Agfa Graphics vice president of sales and marketing Marc Op de Beeck said: "Our engineering teams have refined emulsion technology we use for our conventional plates to also support UV imaging devices."

Also see:
Review: Agfa Amigo