RR Donnelley & Sons, the world largest printer then, played a pivotal role in the dawn of digital platemaking. In late 1980 after the successful introduction of our Laser Scan OPC-B at the Wall Street Journal, Don Reeves, an exec. VP and John Michaelis, a Technical Manager at RRD came to Polychrome to describe their vision of future darkroom-less platemaking. Their vision was sending electronically composed page directly to a digital platemaker placed next to press so that there would be no darkroom operation involved. In order to achieve their vision they would need a plate capable of being exposed digitally, they said. Unfortunately the OPC-B did not fit the bill as the resolution requirement exceeded OPC's capability. They then toured around the world promoting their concept to encourage hardware companies to develop suitable equipment and plate manufacturers to develop suitable plates. On their encouragement numbers of hardware companies such as Linotype Hell, Misomex, Gerber, Creo and others started to develop laser platemaker. At Ipex in 1993, these companies showed freshly designed platemakers. Numbers of plate manufacturers came up with plate designed for such laser platemakers. Polychrome's answer was to use CTX and working closely with platesetter manufacturers we installed CTX in numbers of customer sites. In early days the competitions were mainly from Kalle's photopolyer plate and Howthon's Silverlith plate. Due to its combination of high sensitivity and good plate performance, the CTX became THE plate for many laser platemakers. In fact in 1995 Drupa, experts said to go to Polychrome and see all the digital system in operation. We had Gerber, Linotype Hell and Creo machines running with CTX. No other companies offered a plate with such a wide latitude in exposure and good on press performance.
However, the preheat thermal plate offered by Kodak on Creo equipment received wide attention at the show as it was the system RR Donnelley promoted from the beginning forming a partnership with Creo. Although we did not know then, Creo had financial support by Kodak then. In early 1996 RRD told us they would like us to develop Kodak like preheating thermal plates as they did not like to depend on one supplier for their plate use. We formed a task force and hoped we could have CTX-like company wide participation to the project. But it was Dr. My T Nguyen who quickly came up with an alternative approach to such plate and with a record breaking speed pilot coated, production tested, field tested and then sold to occupy 20% of market share within one year of introduction and 2 years from inception (more on this in separate upload later). We often say that the product development should not be done by technology push but by the market-pull. If ever there is a need for a good example, this must be the one. RRD the customer came up with a vision, encouraged everyone to accept their vision and the entire industry followed their lead to the new digital world.