I wanted to follow up and let everyone know our results with this - First thank you for all the information and a few members personally reaching out to talk with me. The knowledge really helped us with making this decision.
We ended up going with a CTS system over adding another automatic and it has been installed for approx a month now, with I believe around 1200 images now to date. After the initial reorganization of systems regarding our art department and screen room relations, things have been going extremely smoothly with a definite increase in both screen output as well as increased speed in set up times. Some positives I have noticed that I did not think about before purchasing -
- Art Department now outputs more separations in a day without the labor of printing film, packaging, running to the screen room and organizing numerically in our library once screens are completed. I don't have an exact number but visually it looks like 20-30% more per day. Throwing sep files through the RIP and saving to the server is so much faster.
- Increase in resolution of halftone work over film - because I believe it to be the density of wax on smaller percentages. Still need to fully dial in our exposure and have been trying samples of other emulsions as well to perfect our settings - wax CTS, LED exposure, (we still have our 5K), screens coated by auto coater
- Starting to create a production loop in our screen department - now one person image screens, expose and coat all at the same time. The output from these machines has been incredible coming from all manual applications last year.
- Having yet another reminder to work on tighter screen tension - we use all static frames
One thing we did not fully do our research on is the consumables of the machines on the market. There is a lot of selling points of obviously with not purchasing film, and creating extra cash flow, however the consumables I believe are close to the same price at the end of the month. I still need to find that number exactly once I have a little more of a track record with the machine, but I did not look up pricing on consumables between inkjet vs wax before hand. We're Happy with CTS and glad we went this route compared to another automatic.
