Reflections On The Introduction Of CTP Technology Into Cigarette Hinged Lid Box 5 Sticks Color Printing Factory in China

Reflections on the introduction of CTP technology into Cigarette Hinged Lid Box 5 Sticks color printing factory in China

 

1. Advantages of CTP technology

The various advantages of CTP technology applied to printing determine that CTP will be an inevitable trend in the development of the printing industry. From the current application situation, the advantages of CTP technology are mainly reflected in the following aspects:

 

1. Good printing quality

In the CTP plate making technology no longer use film, but through light energy or heat directly to the graphic on the plate, therefore, the plate on the dot is a direct imaging dot, eliminating the film quality characteristics, dust caused by the plate quality problems, compared with ordinary PS plate, CTP plate on the dot is cleaner and clearer. And because of the reduction of plate printing and other processes, many equipment and operating factors in the plate making process are avoided, so that the possibility of human error in the plate making process is greatly reduced. In addition, CTP technology uses a more accurate plate positioning technology, eliminating the error of manual platemaking, the repeated positioning accuracy of the completed four-color plate is higher, and the brightness error in the print can be almost ignored. In summary, the application of CTP technology improves the printing quality.

 

2. Shorten the production cycle and save labor costs

The traditional plate making process takes a certain amount of time from the output film to the printing plate, especially when the number of pages is large, the time required for the work such as making and printing plates is longer, and the situation of printing presses and other plates often appears. The CTP technology can be previewed, electronic Mosaic, and directly imaging on the plate material, so as to eliminate the process of phototypesetting, manual Mosaic, and printing. It takes only one or two minutes to spell out a set of folio four-color plates, and it takes only about ten minutes to output a set of four-color plates, which saves a lot of output time compared with the traditional plate making process and avoids the phenomenon of printing presses and other plates. And because the intermediate link is reduced in the CTP plate making process, the operator required for the intermediate link is also reduced, and a lot of labor costs are saved. In addition, it can greatly shorten the printing preparation time and reduce the consumption of pre-printed paper and ink.

 

3. Network transmission, network confirmation and on-demand printing can be achieved

As a widely used communication tool, the Internet connects printing plants with customers and suppliers to complete sales, distribution of printed matter, management of printing production and ordering of consumables. Now there are many printing houses have realized the network connection, the use of E-mail for business contact. CTP technology fully adopts digital process flow, which provides conditions for online printing, online confirmation and off-site printing. Moreover, CTP can achieve "RIP once, multiple output", after forming a dot array, you can store the data on the hard disk and call the output many times.

 

4. Realize environmentally friendly plate making

The rinse-free thermal plates used in thermal CTP technology can be operated in a bright chamber without chemical rinsing. Compared with the traditional plate making process, the development potion is no longer used, so as to avoid the production of toxic substances such as wastewater, protect the environment, and solve the contradiction between plate making and environmental protection. From the current development of photosensitive CTP technology and plate materials, the technology of chemical free treatment of printing plates is also constantly improving.

 

Second, the introduction of CTP technology should be considered

Although CTP technology has many advantages over the traditional plate making process, it has been successfully applied in units with high timeliness requirements such as newspaper printing plants. However, at present, when the general color printing factory is ready to introduce CTP technology, it should also consider the special requirements in its application and its actual conditions:

 

1. The CTP device is in the first phase

At this stage, the price of CTP equipment from various manufacturers is between 1.6 million yuan and 2.4 million yuan. But the whole system to buy far more than these costs, but also need some related equipment, such as bending drilling equipment, testing equipment, plus customs duties, value-added tax, the whole set down about 3 million yuan. The best traditional plate making equipment only needs hundreds of thousands of yuan, and the purchase of CTP equipment needs to be several times higher.

 

2. Expensive consumables

Plate price has always been the biggest bottleneck for the popularization of CTP technology. At present, there are few domestic manufacturers that can supply high-quality CTP plate materials, and the CTP plate materials used in China are almost all dependent on imports, so although the price of plate materials is falling, the price is still much higher than the traditional plate. As another important content of the CTP process, the effect of digital proofing is not fully convincing, and the expensive price of consumables such as color ink and paper used in digital proofing makes the cost of digital proofing also a burden.

 

3. Related supporting facilities

Because CTP equipment has higher and larger requirements for the site, in order to ensure a good working environment, it is necessary to provide a large enough and suitable distribution of space; One of the advantages of CTP is network transmission, and the construction of a secure and independent Internet network environment is an important condition to give full play to the effect of CTP. Due to the requirements of plate output, it is necessary to achieve the production of electronic plates, while trying to avoid increasing the burden of the process server, it should be equipped with a large plate, layout detection and proof system. In short, in order to be compatible with CTP, the general principle is that everything needs to be digital.

 

4. Talent problem

In the traditional work process, the output personnel only need to output the film, and the subsequent work is all handed over to the subsequent link to complete. However, before CTP output, it is necessary to make a large plate and set the auxiliary information for printing, forming a complete electronic plate. This requires typographers to understand the comprehensive printing requirements, output personnel to be clear about subsequent printing and binding technology, but also must master the use of network skills and electronic document modification technology. Therefore, after the introduction of CTP technology, typesetting and output personnel must expand their knowledge to the print level and the network level. In fact, at present, there are not many talents proficient in all technical knowledge from typesetting to printing, and the existing education and training institutions for technical talents can not fully meet the actual needs. CTP technology completely adopts digital workflow, and the shortage of technical personnel will become more and more prominent.

 

5. The printing resistance of CTP printing plate

Although in the promotion of the printing power of CTP, each manufacturer claims to have two or three hundred thousand prints, but in practical applications, it is found that this is not the case. Because CTP printing plates are often prone to dropping the net after printing tens of thousands of prints, the use of CTP printing will often stop and so on, and sometimes even 10,000 or 20,000 prints will appear.

 

6. Process reliability problem

CTP technology is a new technology, the process is not stable, the use of the process due to the operation method or parameter Settings caused by the loss of network and other problems can not be avoided. In addition, because the CTP directly uses the plate output, the plate should be transmitted in the CTP machine, if the CTP equipment is set unreasonable, maintenance and maintenance is not sufficient, it will also damage and reduce the quality of the plate, resulting in problems such as reduced printing resistance of the plate.

 

7. The problem of digital proofing

After the adoption of CTP technology, because no film is generated, the traditional proofing method can no longer be used, only digital proofing method can be used. The materials and technology used in digital proofing are fundamentally different from printing and traditional proofing, which makes the reliability of digital proofing still have a certain gap with traditional proofing. In addition, if you want to ensure the effect of digital proofing, you must carry out color management operations, and the application of color management in domestic printing plants is generally not mature enough.

 

8. Production management problems

There are great differences between the CTP process and the traditional prepress process, so new requirements are put forward for the production management of CTP. The first is the training and management of technical personnel; The second is the management of electronic documents, because the CTP process is directly output electronic documents to the printing plate, therefore, in addition to the printing plate, electronic documents are the only original information, must be scientifically saved and managed; Again, because the CTP process is a direct output plate, can not be modified like film, its chance of error repair is reduced, so it is necessary to establish the concept of electronic plate, strict preprint inspection, to ensure zero error output.

 

In short, the construction of most of China's printing enterprises has not reached the advanced level of foreign countries, and it should do its best when preparing to invest in CTP equipment. Of course, in order to maintain competitiveness, domestic enterprises should also be prepared to invest in CTP technology.