Apart from the impeccable quality of their work and renowned attention to detail, Woods is known for innovation. In 1985 the company introduced their proprietary UltraDot(R) Printing System. UltraDot makes it possible to print up to 600 line halftone color images that crackle with sharpness and vivid, saturated, life-like color.
The luxurious new prepress facility Woods Lithographics installed has three stations. "Each operator uses two computers," Woods says, "an Indy(TM) workstation and a Macintosh(R) computer. The first two positions are assembly stations, running Contex(TM), and the third one is a color station with Alias Eclipse(TM) and Adobe PhotoShop(TM). We'll have two Agfa 9800s and we're putting in a new DS 1065 Dot Generator from Screen(TM) with an in-line processor." But Frank Woods doesn't plan to stop there.
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"At present," he continues, "we have a Screen main frame 6800 system with two workstations that has four-and-a-half gigabytes of rack storage. It's a 1.5 million dollar color system which we currently use for manipulating color, heavy retouching, assembly and other tasks. I hope to take that out and replace it with the more cost effective Silicon Studio from Silicon Graphics.
"We make decisions on what equipment we buy based on one thing: quality. Our press room is filled with Heidelberg Speedmasters(TM). They aren't the cheapest press; in fact, they're the most expensive. We take the same approach when we're shopping for computers. We don't compromise. I suppose there are less expensive computers than Silicon Graphics systems, but they're just not as good. The fact that they're open systems is a bonus, which we see as becoming a bigger bonus as time goes on."
Art Germer, Woods Lithographics' expert in electronic stripping, is enthusiastic when asked about Silicon Studio solutions. "The Indy does file manipulation using Autotrap, a feature of Xyvision's Contex system," he says. "And then takes high resolution files and outputs them as film--no more stripping. The way our system previously worked, we had an awful lot of jobs that needed to be stripped on the table because of limitations with the imagesetters we were using. We didn't get a hard dot film, so everything needed to be duped. That forced us to go through extra steps to create digital files in order to output film. The Indy's will make that problem go away, and we'll easily be able to triple our workload."
