On October 12, Kodak successfully introduced the new Trendsetter News Platesetter family at IFRA Expo 2009. Since Trendsetter News saw the first light of day at IFRA Expo 2000 as the first daylight-safe newspaper computer-to-plate (CTP) device, it has been and continues to be a very popular CTP device used every day to make plates for millions of newspapers with leading-edge quality from "O Liberal" in the Amazon, to "Het Laatste Nieuws" in the heart of Europe to "China Daily" in Beijing.

The latest enhancements for the new Trendsetter News were well received by customers and resulted in a number of orders signed at IFRA.

Hanuaer Anzeiger, just outside of Frankfurt, Germany, purchased two Trendsetter News S-AL units and will be printing their newspapers before year-end with plates imaged on their newly purchased thermal CTP's.

As this customer experienced firsthand, the Trendsetter News Platesetter's new compact footprint makes it easier than ever to fit parallel plate lines in small prepress rooms, and they will be making plates within days after rolling the equipment into the room.

Thanks to the thousands of customers worldwide who have successfully used Trendsetter CTP's every day for over a decade!

In the Grow Your Biz blog post, "Your Chemistry Free Plate Requires Chemistry", I challenged Agfa's "chemistry free" messaging claiming that Agfa's "chemistry free plates" were neither free of chemistry nor is the chemistry itself free. The posting triggered many to ask and a few to pose the question on PrintPlanet.com, "what chemicals are in that 'chemistry free' solution?" Agfa replied with "Agfa rolled-out the Azura implementation with the preservative gum as the only 'chemical.'" Our point exactly...

Just this week, Simon Nias of PrintWeek reported that "Fujifilm will replace 'misleading' chemistry-free tag with 'low-chemistry' for plate ranges". Kudos to Fujifilm for challenging the credentials of "chemistry free"..

Agfa - the cat's out of the bag. It's your turn to revamp your misleading marketing slogans and be honest to your customers.

Last week I was at this year's IFRA newspaper exhibition in Vienna, Austria. Whilst attendance may have been down on previous years, the Kodak booth was well visited by customers and our dealers.

At the show, we proudly launched our new VioletNews Gold plate for newspapers, which along with its developer system offers customers greatly reduced chemical usage, reduced waste, and associated costs - a hot topic with today's newspaper printers. The new developer system reduces replenishment and antioxidation dosing rates and allows higher developer capacity and cleanliness. This product is now fully available, and is a significant improvement over the established VioletNews product.

We also took the opportunity at IFRA to show a technology demonstration of a new thermal newspaper plate being developed that will reduce processing and equipment complexity with improved features and customer benefits.

These technologies are only the start of our future offset plate development path. Reducing complexity whilst maintaining or improving product performance across different customer requirements and conditions is a continuing goal.

Reducing the different stages of processing, as with the "Simple Process" plates being offered in today's market, or full elimination of processing steps, as with Kodak Thermal Direct (Commercial) and PF-N (Newspaper) Non Process plates, will not yet suit every customer or condition. Kodak is developing new products that will meet the various needs of the diverse newspaper printing industry. Certain market segments still need the performance and robustness only delivered today by preheat and/or prewash technologies.

However, our technology demonstration at IFRA showed a thermal no preheat, no prewash newspaper plate system, presently in early selected customer testing, that is aimed to deliver very high press robustness and chemical resistance with a shorter processing footprint and low chemical consumption. The customer should be able to use their existing processor, switching off the preheat and prewash sections, saving energy, water, and waste.

Customers I met with on the stand made it clear that in today's market newspaper printers are being challenged to improve costs, reduce waste, and be environmentally responsible, but they still need to maintain productivity, quality and deadlines.

These customers were keen to tell me that products must meet both today's and future demands, and in particular manufacturers must pay attention to the environmental aspects. Also, customers expect performance in prepress, on press and with the printed copy to be maintained if not improved.

Customer response to our product approach was very positive, confirming that reducing chemical usage, waste and associated costs was a large growing requirement in their business. Customers also confirmed that the need to maintain product performance was key, and our new VioletNews Gold plate and technology demonstration both were on target.