Jaymar Packaging adds new plate production
Packaging Solutions
Dennison Group has been a long term pre-press partner for Jaymar, and its relationship with Prepress UK also goes back a number of years.
Roy Milner, managing director of Dennison Group, said: ‘With spares becoming ever more difficult to obtain for the existing unit, we were delighted to be able to assist long standing customer Jaymar. The refurbished Avalon is the ideal CTP solution for this busy packaging business.’
Commenting from Jaymar’s perspective, gary marsh, production Director, said: ‘At Jaymar we pride ourselves on working to exceptionally short lead times. With our ageing unit we could see potential issues in the future should the CTP fail. We tasked Dennison Group to find us a newer CTP in order to prevent any delays for our customers. We went for the ‘belt and braces’ approach by installing the Agfa unit alongside the existing unit giving us both reliability, capacity, and back up.’
Prepress UK’s first task was to ensure that the pre-press computer systems were up to the job of serving files to the new high speed CTP engine.
After remotely auditing the existing system, Prepress UK recommended two Xitron RasterBlaster Pro systems – these provide intelligent, organised plate production to virtually any pre-press workflow, regardless of manufacturer. This software was installed on Prepress UK custom built, high end, Windows 10 Pro PC’s incorporating RAID1 hard disk plate archives to ensure total system back up.
These systems have then been linked to the latest Xitron Navigator 12 Harlequin RIP, again running on a bespoke Prepress UK built PC, eliminating older, unsupported computer platforms that were both security and failure risks to the company, as well as performing well below current standards.
Commenting on the upgrades, Andrew Aldridge, technical manager of Prepress UK, said: ‘With regards to custom building all our computer platforms, it has been Prepress UK’s policy for many years now that saving a few pounds on PC hardware is a false economy. You invest tens of thousands in CTP and hundreds of thousands in printing presses – why would you connect those devices with a £500 off the shelf PC with cheap components? For very little more money we will buy high end branded components to build platforms specifically tailored for our industry, with built in redundant drives, the latest PCIe solid state system disks, fast RAM, tenth generation Intel Core processors, all complete with a free 12 month on site warranty.’
As part of the audit process Jon at Jaymar identified pinch points in the pre-press file preparation that added unnecessary complexity to its processes, so during installation Prepress UK was able to implement changes to accommodate a simplified pre-press process, allowing jobs to more easily be repurposed between the two manroland printing presses. After the CTP and pre-press installations were completed, dot gain calibration of both printing presses were established and fed into the system to allow Jaymar to move further towards its desired ISO 12647-2 colour standards.
Regarding print quality issues, Jaymar’s Gary Marsh added: ‘Being able to turn jobs round quickly on its own is not enough to secure continued custom. Here at Jaymar we are heavily focused on quality. By calibrating both CTP units and finger printing both presses for UV inks and conventional inks we feel we are in a strong position to maintain and improve our reputation for best quality print within the industry.’
