Agfa disclosed plans to purchase the Hoechst operation at Drupa and recently announced agreement to conclude the deal, which was the largest acquisition in the company's history. The Ozasol LE 100, named after Hoechst's Ozasol-brand plates, is manufactured by the Belgian supplier Strobbe. It is a fully automatic flatbed imager that handles two newspaper-size plates in one operation. It is designed to handle more than 100 plates per hour in unattended mode, depending upon resolution and plate size. These plates are moved from the trolleys onto the exposure bed.
Plates can be either prepunched or unpunched.
The two plates are positioned on the exposure bed using a three-point alignment system for unpunched plates, or by register pins for punched plates. After imaging, the plates are removed automatically from the bed and transferred to a transport conveyor, which takes them into the plate processor. The imaging speed is fast enough to image two plates at 1,200 dpi in 70 seconds, not counting loading and unloading time. The LE 100 is driven by the Strobbe RIP running on a Macintosh, Windows, NT or Sparcstation platform. The RIP uses the Harlequin ScriptWorks interpreter.