Solopress, Southend, the fast-turnaround 24-hour printing business running Heidelberg Speedmaster perfecting litho presses has detailed its latest PressProfiler system that it has purchased from Prepress UK.

This latest PressProfiler CIP3 and PressProfiler Report package has been tailored specifically for the new B1-format Speedmaster XL3 XL106 10-colour perfecting press, added to the Southend site in Q4 2022. The new installation compliments the packages installed in previous years on the other Solopress Heidelberg presses, including three XL75 10-colour perfectors and Solopress’s five original SM74 presses, with the software providing savings on every single make-ready.

Truprint Media, Margate, has announced details of an upgrade to its pre-press department with new software and hardware provided by Prepress UK, the pre-press specialists based in Brighton. The upgrade follows previous enhancements installed by the same supplier back in 2014.

That investment has served the business well, but this summer their studio equipment was starting to show its age with problems on their graphic design Macs, with an early version of Enfocus PitStop Server for pre-flighting, and a nearly full NAS storage system.

After a remote pre-press audit Prepress UK were able to recommend moving their Adobe Creative Suite applications to new custom built, high-specification PC’s along with a new file and pre-flighting server, with double the RAID storage, running the latest Enfocus PitStop Server 2020.

During a review of their processes by Andrew Aldridge, Technical Manager of Prepress UK, unnecessary steps were identified and eliminated providing an additional boost to productivity.

Jaymar Packaging Ltd, Crewe, has announced details of an upgrade to its B1 pre-press system by purchasing an Agfa Avalon N8 engine to take over from its existing Screen PT-R 8000. The machine was purchased from Dennison Group who then sub-contracted Prepress UK to provide a pre-press audit, software upgrades, and calibration of the company’s two manroland R700 B1-format printing presses.

Dennison Group has been a long-term pre-press partner for Jaymar, and its relationship with Prepress UK, independent suppliers of software solutions for pre-press and print, also goes back a number of years.

Roy Milner, Managing Director of Dennison Group, commenting on the installation, said: “With spares becoming ever more difficult to obtain for the Screen 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 Screen 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 Screen unit giving us both reliability, capacity, and back-up.”

Give us 5 mintues of your time and we could save you hours in prepress...

This week, like most weeks, we helped a print business where an ageing RIP computer failed, leaving them without the ability to make plates, bringing production to a halt during this already very difficult period for all our businesses.

We got them back up and running, but they were without plates for nearly 2 days because they had no disaster recovery plan, no backups and an unsupported Windows 7 RIP computer which was past its end of life.

This is a recurring story: we are helping people recover from a disaster when we could be helping to avoid one.

While keeping our families safe and healthy in the current crisis is our number one concern, you are no doubt, like us, wondering just how tricky life and business is going to get in the coming weeks and months.

We wanted to let you know what we're doing and how we and others in the industry may be able to help.

We're still attending sites to provide services and installations and following reasonable precautions including avoiding hand-shakes, cleaning touch-screens and keyboards, using hand-gels and where possible maintaining some distance so we can all continue to work for as long as possible.

While we will isolate if anyone gets ill, we will otherwise be continuing to provide product and services to our customers as normal and wanted to highlight some ways in which we and the industry may be able to help you do the same.

Prepress UK, the pre-press specialists based in Brighton, has sold and installed its first PressProfiler product to a printing company in Australia. Southport Printing Co. in Queensland have purchased the ink key pre-setting system for a Heidelberg SM52.

PressProfiler integrates with the printers new Screen Equios workflow without the need for them to purchase the Equios CIP3 option, saving the company even more money than the already competitively priced Prepress UK product when compared to Heidelberg's offering.

Commenting on the purchase, Andrew Kelly of Southport Printing Company, said, “PressProfiler is a product that represents great value. To do the same with the press manufacturers own branded package would cost five times as much. The team at Prepress UK do a fantastic job at a great price!

“We were particularly impressed by the remote installation and calibration service. Faster and just as effective, but significantly more affordable, than sending an engineer to do the job. The profiles and ink sweeps are extremely accurate, saving both time and money.”