A significant development that has been taking place in the background for some months has now been confirmed. Proteck Machinery has been appointed as a distributor for Dainippon Screen’s graphic arts equipment and software in India. Dainippon Screen Manufacturing Co., Ltd is one of the world’s largest manufacturers and suppliers of system components for the prepress and printing industries. Its large range of equipment includes scanners, RIPs, proofing systems, and imagesetters, as well as platesetters and digital printing presses. The company is also a well-known manufacturer of equipment for the semiconductor and flat panel display manufacturing industries.

Our readers are well aware of Screen (as it is widely known) and that it is well established in India for more than thirty years right from the days of vertical gallery cameras and flatbed proof presses. After that it was electronic colour separators known as scanners and capstan and drum imagesetters before the onset of computer to plate output devices in which Screen has a predominant position in the world market as well as the Indian market.

Screen’s first computer-to-plate (CtP) recorder the PlateRite 1080 based on a visible light laser was launched in 1995 was a digital prepress industry milestone. In 2007 the company installed its 11,000th CtP output device and has recently launched a very large format platesetter capable of outputting as many as 36 pages at a time.

In the recent drupa, IPEX, Print, and IGAS exhibitions, Screen has been showing its automated small format digital offset TruePress, and since Print05 its high-speed inkjet document press the TruePress Jet520. At Drupa08, the Truepress Jet2500UV will be commercially launched after its preview at Fespa last year. The Truepress Jet 2500UVis a wide format flatbed and roll-fed inkjet print system with high quality greyscale printheads that enable printing on rigid and flexible substrates with high print quality as well as productivity.

Proteck Machinery will be selling and servicing all of Screen’s graphic arts products in the Indian market — right from Rips and workflow and CtPs to the new digital offset and inkjet presses. Proteck is one of the leading engineering and sales and service companies in India and well known throughout the world for its manufacture and export of engineering design software, plate exposure systems and film and plate processors. It is also a manufacturer of UV and coating equipment, servo driven rotary silk screen presses, programmable cutting machines, and complex blister packaging machinery.

In recent years Proteck has made a huge contribution by helping a large number of Indian printers buy automated and high performance configurations of brand new multicolour Mitsubishi offset presses. The company has more than fifty service engineers in place and these will be increased to 60 in the coming months if not weeks. Of the sixty engineers, twenty-four will be trained for servicing Screen’s CtP and other offerings. Proteck is headquartered in Chennai in South India with offices in thirteen cities throughout the country including the six metros.