Buying a 3-in-1 plate maker

You need a way to output film to use in the platemaker. Normally this involves an imagesetter made by Agfa and others. The whole rig will cost about 5 to 6 grand. Then you can look at platemakers…Jet seems to be decent. But understand you are looking at about 10K to be fully able to go from design software to finished plates. Boxcar sells platemakers as does Fritz at NA Graphics.

For film for photopolymer line-art, a line camera can be very handy if you’ve got the space and time. Older imagesetters and film processors will set you back at least 5k as rziesing says, and if you want a nice, new, daylight load with inline film processing you’re looking closer to 15k.

I’m getting set up shooting camera film from laser output and tray developing film and the results are very good. The results aren’t quite as good as from a 3000dpi imagesetter, but with good paper through a 1200dpi printer you can produce nice line-art and text work with a camera, and they are practically free these days.

Williamson Printing Materials in Grimsby, Ontario sells platemakers. I think they will be able to help with answering your questions as well. They also have a nice website (you can Google them and once you have their website, then look under equipment, platemaking, Anderson & Vreeland Inc., and then scroll down to the bottom of that page).