Flatbed printing is a fashionable and advanced technology today. Flatbed printer is a brand new digital product on the market. We always called it digital flatbed printer. Two new hotly requested plug-ins for EstiMate are right around the corner. We’ve developed plug-ins for flatbed digital printing and for sandblasted signs that are just about ready to go. From the get-go, we have wanted to cover as many areas as possible in the sign business, and EstiMate 2 really lets us deliver. If you haven’t upgraded yet, we are running a 10% off upgrade sale through September 30, so you may want to upgrade now and get ready for these when they are released.
First, a look at the flatbed digital plug in.  As you can see, we’ve really put some thought into how this plug-in works. Although we have a wide format digital printing plug-in, flatbed printing has some specific differences that have been addressed.
Specifically, in the flatbed digital plug-in you can not only select the coverage of ink (a feature that was recently added to the wide format digital plug-in) but you can also select to double hit the ink if you need really dense colors. Surface preparation has been taken into account in this plug-in, offering you options for prep solution and adhesion promoter. Just like in all of EstiMate’s other plug-ins, both the cost of the materials and labor time are built-in as soon as you select either of these options.
You can choose the screen print if you like. Screen printing is a printing technology which is widely used. So does the screen printer. RIP Time is also taken into account so you can bill your customer appropriately.
Some of the things the flatbed digital plug-in has in common with the wide format plug-in are an array of printers, print modes, print media, and inks. Top and bottom laminate are also included to round out the plug-in.
One major difference between the flatbed digital and wide format plug-ins is that ink coverage is no longer determined in the configuration screen but rather entered when you enter the ink into the database. The “ink usage curve” setting in the wide format plug-in has been a real headache for a lot of customers, and quite frankly, could have been better designed. So we will roll this change into the wide format plug-in in a future release as well.