Any interest in Direct to Screen (DTS)?

[bimmridder]

The last time I sent a multi color design to Ace for transfers, I was surprised that they told me to not worry about reg marks fitting because they don't need them with their DTS system.

What are registration marks? I know it's petty, but if you want to count pennies, we use one small piece of tape on the print side to tape off the information box. No reggies to tape off anymore. (Except on 4CP)

[ZooCity]

Imagine a CTS with integrated registration system. I'm telling ya.

You don't have to tell me.  That's the main attraction in my opinion.  I'll agree with the Captain of the Ink Brigade here that the price is retardo though.   Not saying the gear isn't worth it's asking price just that smaller shops aren't going to get a return in a reasonable amount of time if they're replacing a decently managed pre-press system with the CTS.   If you're replacing a really awful pre-press routine with CTS then, of course, it would justify itself just because it made you eliminate a critical set of error points. 

I'm sure the final, resolved on screen, dot and fine line quality is super rad with CTS as well and could be enough in and of itself for some operations to justify it.  Why bother with an imagesetter by comparison?   

Out of curiosity, what were you doing before going CTS?

Also, we often wreck up a color or two on our films due to poor overprint settings or something.  This is like a semi-weekly thing.  I would hate to do that with coated screens.  Then again it would teach you in a big hurry to learn the overprint settings, etc. as you couldn't afford not to.   Do you run into this much? 

[bimmridder]

Before CTS we were film. We had an Oyo thermal imaging system, but got tired of fighting all the issues at the time. We went to an Epson 7800 I think it was. I've said this often, but need to repeat it. We do a lot of short runs (48-288) and high screen count. Six to eight colors is common. Doing 15-30 jobs a day, you can imagine the film cost alone. We have used Tri-Loc since it became available, though not as it is designed. I modified its use to work better for us.

I think somewhere I stated that art issues can be more easily recognized. How much film waste do you have? I'm embarrassed to say, but we didn't know how much until we really dug into it. This was a problem in itself. The artists fought almost to their death to avoid going CTS. How would they catch their mistakes. They wouldn't have film to look at and check for errors. They wouldn't admit it, but a lot of errors were caught, resulting in outputting the same files over again. CTS MADE THEM BECOME BETTER at their job. There is software for proofing. Yes, mistakes still happen, but very rarely. If you are lucky enough to catch it when you are imaging a screen, the wax (on my I-Jet) can be wiped off and the screen imaged again. The screen isn't toast.

And fixing that mistake? It's all digital. The artist corrects the file, sends it to the machine again, and you have a screen in 10 minutes. Do that with film and how long will it take. And will the new piece of film even register to the other pieces you've imaged, or do you now have to scrap the job and output the entire job again?

Hope this makes sense. I know I tend to wander, but I'm trying to help you understand the benefits.

[Sbrem]

We proof our films to paper through a laser printer first, to make sure everything is correct before going to film. The laser printer proofs come out pretty fast, so not much time lost at all. As for film, we tend to use $150 - $200 a month. In the days of PMT film and darkrooms and cameras, film was far more expensive than it is today. Unless we had considerably more volume, I couldn't justify the expense. We have an MHM and the registration unit is unbelievably easy to use. You can line up 4 films on 4 screeens in about a minute and a half, maybe less if you want to show off. Still, I'd love to have the bragging rights of having one...

Steve

[ZooCity]

Hope this makes sense. I know I tend to wander, but I'm trying to help you understand the benefits.

No that makes a lot of sense, thanks for sharing.