I believe the Kodak Sonora Xtra plate has fixed the issue with the image being too light.
Or at least it is better.  We will see next week when we test.

I can officially confirm that Heidelberg is now using the Kodak Sonora Xtra as it's process free plate offering to its customers.
Just had our Heidelberg rep in here yesterday and we are going to be testing the Sonora Xtra through our Supersetter 106 CTP.
Then onto our 40 inch Heidelberg press's.

I had heard this before about Kodak and Heidelberg and i just got confirmation of it from a former Heidelberg offset press tech who was in our shop last week.
BUT....maybe he was confusing Kodak with AGFA.....who knows.

I just recently found out that Kodak supplies Heidelberg with all their plates.
At least in America anyway.
So I am sure Heidelberg is passing along even more cost to its plate customers after buying from Kodak to just make some profit.  Heidelberg is brutal with their upcharges on everything and anything they can slap their name onto.

I get frequent emails like this from Jim Continenza CEO at Kodak about the Fuji plate situation...

https://www2.kodak.com/webmail/54782/924202701/e6901ef95a12e2a2aa00860b950e170e

Back in 2017 - 2018 we had the Kodak Sonora XP and it was a struggle getting the makeready sheets to cleanup within the first 10 sheets as Kodak would tout as the norm. Also we were getting contamination problems in fountain solution.
We ended up in a bit of a back and forth with Kodak and the pressroom manager gave their plates the boot.

I here ya on both your complaints, we hated that we could hardly see the image or text etc. and could not delete anything off the plate without the whole area getting contaminated.

We are revisiting bringing them back in since the technology has improved.
They have a new plate now too called the Sonora XTRA.

Anyone here using Kodak's process free plate, the Sonora XP or the Sonora XTRA?
Are they really rinsing or washing off during makeready in 5-10 sheets?
Are they contaminating the water?

Here is a link about Pistop WGM...
https://www.enfocus.com/en/pitstop-workgroup-manager

We have used this for at 8-9 years now.
No license's at the work station's the single floating license resides witht the workgroup manager.
We have a 5 user license.
The WGM can be installed on any computer on your LAN but i recommend installing it on a Windows 11 PC or Windows Server 2019.
We currently have it installed on our lone Windows 11 station in prepress that also hosts our Fiery Hot Folders for printing lasers to Konica Minolta c300 w/Fiery Rip. The computer will need to be left on all the time.

That form is actually our old one but our new one is essentially the same with some minor tweaks.
Especially to the area with instructions for the customer.

We also have a Prepress Quality Sheet that i have often thought about sharing with everyone.
This PDF with form fields is inserted into every job that gets created in Prinergy via an RBA rule.
But it could be used in any workflow with some tweaks to the Prinergy specific fields.
Eveytime a prepress operator touches a job they fill out the corresponding field.
Most of the fields have drop downs to eliminate typing redundant info.
It is two sided and gets printed out and travels with the job in the job bag and is filed in a folder with the job once it is billed.
So here it is..

Here is ours,
It is used internally and externally.
Meaning every part of every job has one of those in with its job bag once prepress releases soft proofs or the CSR ships hard copies.
The customer also sees it with his hard copy proofs.
Emails and/or InSite upload email notices for AA's or REv's will be stapled to the back of the proof appproval form too.

Same here....been in offset shops my whole life.
Except for some part time stripping and plating work at a web shop years ago.
Never picked up the web press lingo.
It was a hoot though stripping book work for web presses.

LOL...yup, I actually have a G4 or G5 sitting in my basement collecting dust and mildew probably.

Funny, I was recently going through old software boxes and came across several Pitstop 7 and Pitstop 8 DVD cases.
Not sure why we have them and i still could not bring myself to throw them out.

If you dont keep that maintenance plan going it can be a lot more expensive to renew 2-3 years later.
Plus there is the piece of mind factor and the ease of use and these days its critical to keep software up to date,
Except of course for Acrobat ...LOL

No, its there... but with rulers on it appears it is getting clipped.
The page used to get nudged down when rulers were on or turned on and that no longer happens on a Mac anyway.

How about this problem in Windows... rulers hiding the edges of pages...