Kodak Sonora plates set to take market by storm

The adoption of Kodak’s process-free plates by Akruti stems from both their economic and environmental benefits. The father and son duo of Girish and Sahil Rao said to PrintWeek India that the "plates eliminate the processing step required by traditional thermal CTP plates and provide significant energy, water, and waste reductions without requiring printers to make sacrifices on productivity or print capabilities."

“While there are other process-free plates, they have certain limitations, such as short-run length capabilities, slow imaging speeds and weak visibility of latent image after exposure. Sonora plates are in a new class, combining the benefits of process-free with the productivity, print capabilities and excellent visibility of latent image, making operators’ lives easy, just like mainstream plates,” said Abhiram Sathe, senior manager, technical support from Kodak.

With continued pipeline growth, significant manufacturing investments, and more customers available to share their experience with the plates, Kodak expects 2015 to be a year of success. Numerous initiatives to stimulate Sonora plates growth directly led to results across all regions.

In the US and Canada, the plate customers grew at a 400% rate in 2014. Kodak is both adding new customers and proactively converting customers from Kodak thermal direct non-process plates to Sonora plates in anticipation of new plate manufacturing capacity in Columbus, Georgia in the US.

In Asia, Kodak recently upgraded its Xiamen, China plate plant to manufacture Sonora plates, contributing to the growth in plate shipments in the region. Kodak shipped the plates to more than 200 customers in Asia in 2014. Sathe is confident that "This number is expected to increase in 2015."

In Europe, year-on-year growth was more than 200% in 2014. At the Wan-Ifra World Publishing Expo 2014, Kodak gave live demonstrations of the plates as they become available for European newspaper publishing.

In Latin America, several large flagship newspapers converted to Sonora news plates. Kodak Sonora XP process-free plate and Sonora news plate sales account for about 35% of all Kodak plate sales in the region.

“Our commitment to providing regionally manufactured Sonora plates to our customers has been a critical component of our customer service programme. We look forward to further developing these relationships to promote sustainable and efficient printing worldwide,” said Brad Kruchten, president of Kodak’s print systems division.