Dragon Print and its Glunz & Jensen PlateWriter

Sept. 15, 2011 - PRLog -- FOUR machines have become redundant and scrapped at a Hertfordshire printers following its investment in a Glunz & Jensen PlateWriter 2000.
This revelation was made by Stephen Vince, partner at Dragon Print & Design in Hitchin, who says that there is now much more space in his print room. “Buying the PlateWriter has meant that we have got rid of four pieces of equipment: a large sink to develop plates and a huge UV unit for exposing them. An image setter and a film processor have all gone, too,” explains Stephen, who runs the company with business partner Peter Choo.
“We bought the Glunz & Jensen PlateWriter 2000 because of a whole list of reasons. The image setter we had was very old and costly to keep going and it wasn’t producing the quality we needed. The G&J PlateWriter was the right price - this technology used to be very expensive. It now costs us half the amount of money to produce a plate than it did before using the old way partly because it’s a green machine. A plate produced on the G&J PlateWriter costs £1.75 to make compared to over £3.00 using the old system. It will have paid for itself in five years.”
Prior to installing the PlateWriter 2000 Dragon Print had seen a roll of film “shoot through the roof from £94 in 2010 to £160 a roll now”. “We were using two rolls a month so it was costing us so much and we were using so many chemicals, which were costing us £400 a year to remove,” Stephen recalls. “It really did make financial sense to make the change and there’s far less wastage this way, too – the aluminium plates can still be recycled.”
He adds: “The Glunz & Jensen PlateWriter doesn’t use any nasty chemicals and the time taken to make a plate has been slashed by at least 80 per cent - we save between eight and 10 hours a week during a busy period. Our costs have been cut by nearly 50 per cent. The PlateWriter can also make different sizes of plates without any extra set up time making this machine extremely versatile in the print room with several different size presses.
“The quality of the end product is very noticeable against how we were doing it before. We are now less likely to lose a client through quality issues because the plates produce a “superior and consistent quality image” he says, adding
that Dragon Print makes “around 2,000 plates a year”.
Dragon Print & Design, which has been trading for 10 years and employs five staff, also owns a Heidelberg GTO, a Rotaprint platemaker and an AB Dick T-51 with a two-colour printing head.
Fingerprint Print Room Maintenance (FPRM) in Cambridge sold the Glunz & Jensen PlateWriter 2000 to Dragon
Print. FPRM owner John Davidson says: “It’s great to see the huge, positive impact the PlateWriter 2000 has had at Dragon Print. I’ve been dealing with Steve and Peter since they started, and it’s been obvious that as with most smaller printing companies, they have had to watch expenditure very closely, in a very tight market. They were also very aware of issues relating to quality and the damage a single badly printed job can do to a business. It’s very satisfying to have been able to help them make such a positive investment with so many immediate benefits.”
He concludes: “I think Stephen’s description of the PW2000’s impact says it all, speed, efficiency, quality up. Wastage, environmental damage, production time, costs down – every printer’s dream scenario.”

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Intec Printing Solutions is a heavy stock colour digital printer manufacturer in Poole, Dorset, UK. It is the sole distributor of Glunz & Jensen PlateWriters in the UK and Ireland. During 2011 it has opened offices in Germany and America. Intec Printing Solutions was established by Managing Director Ian Melville.