Prepress
Lehtisepät Oy Kuopio reduces chemistry usage by 70% with Fujifilm Brillia PRO-VN
Tuesday 20. October 2009 - FUJIFILM Europe today announces the successful installation of its Brillia PRO-VN low-chemistry plate at Lehtisepät Oy Kuopio in Finland. As well as improvements to productivity and quality, the Brillia PRO-VN plate has allowed Lehtisepät Oy Kuopio to achieve a 70% reduction in chemistry usage alongside huge savings in terms of water usage.
As Sauli Vuorinen, press production manager, explains: “With this system, the unexposed areas of the PRO-VN plates are removed with a mild alkali liquid, which also serves to gum the plate. The finishing solution doesnt need to be replenished with any chemistry, and water is automatically added to the finishing solution to compensate for any evaporation.
“Its brought a new stability to our plate making process and the minimal maintenance of the finishing unit improves our productivity as theres much less necessary downtime. The plate behaves excellently on press, working extremely well with our specific printing conditions without requiring any changes or adjustments. Were achieving run-lengths of over 120,000 and the quality of our print has improved since installing the PRO-VN system.”
“Weve reduced our chemistry usage by 70% which obviously has a knock-on effect on the amount of waste we produce and have to dispose of. And, as the new system doesnt require any rinse water, weve made huge savings in terms of water usage as well. Add to this the fact that we are consuming less natural resources and need to dispose of less waste chemicals than with our previous plate, and you can see why were so pleased with the plate in terms of its environmental performance.”
He concludes: “Overall, were delighted with the PRO-VN system – our experiences so far have been 100% positive, which explains our recent decision to convert our second plate processing line over to the PRO-VN lo-chem plates.”
Brillia PRO-VN plate is a low-chemistry violet CTP plate specifically developed for the newspaper market. Based on the same technologies as Fujifilm’s Brillia HD PRO-V low-chemistry violet plate for general commercial print applications, Brillia PRO-VN allows newspaper printers to drastically reduce chemistry usage. Utilising Fujifilm’s high sensitivity polymerisation’ technology, the Brillia PRO-VN newspaper plate enables newspaper printers to achieve the same levels of productivity with PRO-VN as those achieved with conventional processed violet CTP plates.