Cron, which arrived in France barely ten years ago, has carved out a good place for itself on the French market for commercial printing CTPs. And with their latest customer, Pierre Declerck and his son Jean d'Arc en Ciel Sublimation, Cron's exclusive distributor, are proving that the brand has all the assets to meet the expectations of the very select sector of security CTPs.
The Philaposte production site, which prints all the stamps of France, has just been equipped with a very high resolution Cron CTP.
Philaposte, a highly secure printing site, equipped with a CTP Cron 46G+
Located in Boulazac in the Dordogne, the printing plant of the La Poste group, which employs 450 people, includes an impressive number of printing techniques as well as very complete finishing, packaging and picking workshops.
In addition to French philatelic production, Philaposte is responsible for printing cheque funds and mailing loans, producing security labels for cigarette packages and security products for the National Printing Office (such as passport cover sheets), and responding to calls for tender for the production of postage stamps from other states.
In mid-May, just after the end of the confinement, Pierre and Jean Declerck installed a CTP Cron 46G+ 8 exposures (1160 x 940 mm) with charger and 96 engraving diodes. It was installed in Philaposte's prepress workshop alongside a 12-year-old 9600 dpi mono-resolution plate engraver with a production capacity of three plates per hour.
High technical standards demanded by the Philaposte prepress workshop
"To find our new PTC, we have issued a call for tenders.. explains Pascal Boussard, head of the project department at Philaposte. We work with large lineatures (up to 600 lpp), as we produce security products with small guilloches and microtexts up to 350 microns high that require extreme fineness. So we wanted multi-resolution CTP up to 9600 dpi, while being able to achieve the intermediate resolutions - 2400, 4800, 6400 dpi - for our other products."
The unbeatable price/performance ratio of CTP Cron d'Arc en Ciel Sublimation
After multiple tests of the different contenders, Philaposte has chosen the CTP of Arc en Ciel Sublimation. The offset plate engraving tests were carried out in Cron's technical centre in Düsseldorf, Germany.
"This Cron CTP is the equipment with the best price/performance ratio. We have a technical rating out of 60 points and a price rating out of 40: Cron got the highest score. Technically, it met all our requirements with almost the highest score, and on the price side, it was far, far ahead of the competition."
Automation of plate loading release
And while there are still a few compensation curves to be achieved (due to covid-19), the first high-resolution offset plates engraved in the workshop meet all expectations. The old CTP is still in production, mainly for the production of letterpress plates. The new CTP produces the offset plates for printing cheque backgrounds, ready to mail and security labels and some stamps for abroad.
"The engraving goes four times faster. But if productivity was an important criterion, it was above all the automation of the process that interested us, underlines Philippe Vertuol, head of department of Philaposte. With our old CTP, the operator is obliged to put the plates one by one and therefore to stay next to the device. We now have a CTP with a loader for five plate formats, which allows us to start the production of several plates directly. Not all manufacturers offered such advanced automation."
Arc en Ciel Sublimation's after-sales service that stands out from other suppliers
"Another of the strong points of Pierre Declerck's Arc en Ciel company is that it is French, and is located in France, adds Pascal Boussard. Maintenance and after-sales service are carried out from France, which was not necessarily the case for other manufacturers. This is reassuring, because it will be faster and easier."
Pierre Declerck confided to us: "For a company like ours, it's especially gratifying that our machines, our seriousness and our services are recognized by such a remarkable player in security printing."
