Advantage ... Digital
Advantage—Digital? Not so fast ...
For prepress shops, says Hole, “Traditional work with film cannot achieve the quality of digital plates. There is a dramatic increase of the sharpness of ‘perfect’ dots, with a much wider tonal range. The shape of a digital dot has a better, stronger conical top. [As a result], it gets a more precise transfer of ink relative to the size of the dot it prints. Press impression is less critical to the size or sharpness of the dot print result, as the exact size required on the printed substrate has already been produced on the plate.” Moreover, says Hole, digital plates run color shades reliably between 1-99 percent of full color, while the range for film plates is about 5-93 percent for flexible packaging and 12- 93 percent for corrugated.
