Nothing has a more voracious appetite for litho plates than a newspaper offset web press. The Villages Daily Sun, a newspaper and commercial printer in Central Florida is keeping its web offset equipment well fed on a diet of KODAK SONORA Process Free Plates served up by a pair of KODAK GENERATION NEWS thermal CtP platesetters – a combination that gives the pressroom the volume and the versatility it needs to stay ahead of a rising demand for the things it produces.

The Villages Daily Sun has a long-standing reputation for quality as a coldset web offset printer. Its flagship product, The Daily Sun newspaper, grew from a small hometown paper into one of the largest daily papers in Florida. Specializing in newspaper printing, the company also handles a significant volume of commercial printing from around the state.

The main press at The Villages Daily Sun is a Koenig & Bauer Commander CT web with a total capacity of 96 plates in three printing towers and a top speed of 90,000 copies per hour. Keeping up with it in prepress created a demand for plate throughput that the plant’s two original CtP devices were far from being able to satisfy.

“When we are in full production, we require just over 200 plates per hour at 1,200 dpi to meet our full replacement requirement,” says Steven A. Infinger, Director of Operations. Working in tandem in Z-speed mode, the GENERATION NEWS devices are more than up to the task with their doubled outputs of 115 plates per hour at that resolution in a 36-inch plate format.