Pradeep Sakhadeo of Orion Photosensitive Systems, said, “Industry is shifting from analogue plates to digital plates. But still there is huge demand of analogue plates as the cost of exposing devices for digital plates is high. As far as digital plates are concerned market is still trying out thermal CTP, UV CTCP and Violet plates. And there is no clear winner among these three types. But UV CTCP being a cheaper media than thermal plates, it is getting popular.”

Orion which was established in 1988 is a research oriented company and has developed its own technology to manufacture the plates required for the growing market. “We have our own research and development department and all of our products are developed by them without any technical collaboration,” Sakhadeo added.

Besides digital plates, Orion also manufactures PS plates for short-run and long run jobs, fountain solution, plate cleaner, wash, gum and PS coating solution. The company has manufacturing capacity of 1.5 million sq/m plate per year which includes all types of plates. Sakhadeo said, “The sale of individual brand varies every month. The sales volume was less for last few months due to dumping of Chinese plates, however now with the launch of digital plates we are hoping to achieve the targets.”

With the customer-base spread all over India, Orion caters to process houses, newspapers and commercial printers.

The company has installed new quality control equipment so as to minimise the deviation in production parameters. “Quality parameters are at par with all the big brand manufacturers,” added Sakhadeo.

“Our state-of-the-art fully automatic plant covers an area of 1,00,000 sq/ft of which 25,000 sq/ft area houses coil to coil flat-bed mono block litho processing line,” concluded Sakhadeo.