Swiss pre-press firm Lscher has launched a B2 version of its XPose! internal drum thermal platesetter and notched up the sale of its 200th machine, which it sold to Quebecor World.

"For a small company like Lscher, 200 is a significant milestone," said board member Lars Janneryd.

The machine is the third XPose! 160 VLF platesetter to be installed at Quebecors magazine printing plant at Recife in Brazil.

Lschers latest machine, the B2 XPose! 75, is the firms second attempt at an affordable B2 machine. At Drupa 2000 it displayed a unique flatbed design, the 4Page!, that exposed plates by spinning them and imaging in a spiral like a CD writer records tracks. At the time the firm said this was because it couldnt cost-engineer the internal drum of its XPose! to be affordable for the B2 market.

"It was a crazy idea I had before Drupa," said technical director Peter Berner. "We found it takes a lot of computer power to recalculate ripped data for spiral exposure. The computing power is too expensive, but the project has not been canned, just mothballed."

The XPose! 75 uses a smaller drum than Lschers other machines and half the number of laser diodes. It is a manual loading machine that takes under six minutes to expose a full B2 plate.

A robotic auto-loading system will be launched at Ipex. A faster version with 64 rather than 32 laser diodes will also be available.

It will cost 80,000 in the UK including a HighWater Torrent RIP. UK distributor Turning Point Technologies will also offer it with a Dalim Swing CTP workflow for an additional 10,000.

Lscher has also announced improvements to the rest of the XPose! range resulting in 20% faster imaging, easier-to-replace diodes and the ability to expose multiple plates in the drum at the same time, which it says improves productivity by 75%.

Story by Barney Cox