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Is your printer software up to the job? The impact of rising data rates on software evolved from traditional print processes

Direct™ product manager Ian Bolton explores the impact of using software that has evolved from traditional print processes to drive digital inkjet presses as they advance to print faster, in higher resolution, a wider variety of colors and applications. In particular, Ian focuses on the impact that rising data rates have on the workflow:

Digital press software evolved from traditional print processes has already reached its limit. Digital presses are becoming higher resolution – most are moving from 600 dpi to 1200 dpi, quadrupling the data. They’re also becoming deeper, with up to 7 drop sizes – and these drops are being made from a wider variety of colors. Digital presses are also becoming wider, up to 4 meters wide, and faster,  up to 1,000 feet per minute!

And what if you need to print where every item is different? For example, fully personalized – like curtains, flooring, wall coverings, clothing etc. All of these require software that can deliver ultra-high data rates.

Let’s look at how those data rates scale up as digital presses advance:

The next generation presses demand ultra-high data rates
The next generation presses demand ultra-high data rates

 

If we start with 600 dpi, 20 inches wide, 3 drop sizes and 100 m per minute, then that’s 120 MBps per colorant, which is not too challenging. But once we move up to 1200 dpi, we’ve now quadrupled the data to 480 MBps, which is the read speed of all but the most bleeding-edge solid state drives today.

With printhead, nozzle and roller technology improving, the rated speeds also increase, so what happens when we go up to 300 m per min? It’s now 1.4 GBps and you will need one of those bleeding-edge solid state drives to keep up, bearing in mind you will now be writing as well as reading.

And if we go wider to print our wallcoverings at 40 inches wide, we’re now at 2.8 GBps … and we want our walls to look great close up, so we might be using 7 drop sizes, which takes us up to 5.7 GBps … and this is all just for one colorant!

Based on these numbers, it should be clear now that, for this generation of digital presses and beyond, a disk-based workflow just isn’t going to cut it: reading and writing this amount of data to disk would not actually be fast enough and would require ridiculous amounts of physical storage. This is where software evolved from traditional workflows hits a barrier: the data rate barrier.

To solve this we need to go back to the drawing board. It’s similar to the engineering challenge of moving from propeller-driven aircraft to jets that could break the sound barrier. Firstly, you need to develop a new engine and then you need to commercialize it.

So, if you’re looking for software to power your first or next digital press it’s going to need the right  kind of software engine that isn’t based on disk technology so that you can drive your digital press electronics directly and smash through the data rate barrier. In other words, you need to go Direct.

To learn more about the impact of rising data rates and how you can futureproof your next digital press, visit our website to find out more about going Direct.

If you’re interested in calculating data rates take a look at this blog post where you can download your own data rate calculator: Choosing the class of your raster image processor

Further reading:

  1. Harlequin Core – the heart of your digital press
  2. What is a raster image processor 
  3. Ditch the disk: a new generation of RIPs to drive your digital press
  4. Is your printer software up to the job?
  5. Where is screening performed in the workflow
  6. What is halftone screening?
  7. Unlocking document potential
  8. Future-proofing your digital press to cope with rising data rates

About the author

Ian Bolton, Product Manager, Direct
Ian Bolton, Product Manager – Direct
Ian has over 15 years’ experience in industry as a software engineer focusing on high performance. With a passion for problem-solving, Ian’s role as product manager for the Direct™ range gives him the opportunity to work with printer OEMs and break down any new technology barriers that may be preventing them from reaching their digital printer’s full potential.

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Choosing the software to drive your digital inkjet press

When developing your first or next digital press, the software you use to drive it will be a key factor in its success, both for the data rates and output quality you can achieve. The time it takes to get your press to market based on the engineering effort involved to deliver and integrate that software is also a consideration.

A simple user interface to get  you started

The Press Operator Controller (POC) is an example front end or user interface available with Harlequin Direct™ , the software solution that drives printhead electronics at ultra-high data rates while retaining high output quality. The POC provides you with an initial working system, so you’re up and running without any significant in-house software development. We provide you with the source code so that you have the option to update and integrate it as part of your production system.

I have created a short video to show you its main functions:

You can find out more information about the Direct™ range of products by visiting our website: https://www.globalgraphics.com/products/direct

Further reading about considerations when choosing your digital inkjet press:

  1. How do I choose the right PC specification for my digital press workflow
  2. Future-proofing your digital press to cope with rising data rates
  3. Looking to reduce errors with simple job management, keep control of color, and run at ultra-high speed for jobs with variable data?

About the author

Ian Bolton, Product Manager, Direct
Ian Bolton, Product Manager – Direct

Ian has over 15 years’ experience in industry as a software engineer focusing on high performance. With a passion for problem-solving, Ian’s role as product manager for the Direct range gives him the opportunity to work with printer OEMs and break down any new technology barriers that may be preventing them from reaching their digital printer’s full potential.

Be the first to receive our news updates and product news. Why not subscribe to our monthly newsletter? Subscribe here

Follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter

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Choosing the class of your raster image processor (RIP) – Part II

Part II: Factors influencing your choice of integration

If you’re in the process of building a digital front end for your press, you’ll need to consider how much RIPing power you need for the capabilities of the press and the kinds of jobs that will be run on it. The RIP converts text and image data from many file formats including PDF, TIFF™ or JPEG into a format that a printing device such as an inkjet print head, toner marking engine or laser plate-setter can understand. But how do you know what RIP is best for you and what solution can best deliver maximum throughput on your output device? In this second post, Global Graphics Software’s CTO, Martin Bailey, discusses the factors to consider when choosing a RIP.

In my last post I gave a pointer to a spreadsheet that can be used to calculate the data rate required for a digital press. This single number can be used to make a first approximation of which class of RIP integration you should be considering.

For integrations based on the Harlequin RIP® reasonable guidelines are:

  • Up to 250MB/s: can be done with a single RIP using multi-threading in that RIP
  • Up to 1GB/s: use multiple RIPs on a single server using the Harlequin Scalable RIP
  • Over 1GB/s: use multiple RIPs spread over multiple servers using the Harlequin Scalable RIP

These numbers indicate the data rate that the RIP needs to provide when every copy of the output is different. The value may need to be adjusted for other scenarios:

  • If you’re printing the same raster many times, the RIP data rate may be reduced in proportion; the RIP has 100 times as long to process a PDF page if you’re going to be printing 100 copies of it, for instance.
  • If you’re printing variable data print jobs with significant re-use of graphical elements between copies, then Harlequin VariData™ can be used to accelerate processing. This effect is already factored into the recommendations above.

The complexity of the jobs you’re rendering will also have an impact.

Transactional or industrial labelling jobs, for example, tend to be very simple, with virtually no live PDF transparency and relatively low image coverage. They are therefore typically fast to render. If your data rate calculation puts you just above a threshold in the list above, you may be able to take one step down to a simpler system.

On the other hand, jobs such as complex marketing designs or photobooks are very image-heavy and tend to use a lot of live transparency. If your data rate is just below a threshold on the list above, you will probably need to step up to a higher level of system.

But be careful when making those adjustments, however. If you do so you may have to choose either to build and support multiple variations of your DFE, to support different classes of print site, or to design a single model of DFE that can cope with the needs of the great majority of your customers. Building a single model certainly reduces development, test and support costs, and may reduce your average bill of materials. But doing that also tends to mean that you will need to base your design on the raw, “every copy different”, data rate requirements, because somebody, somewhere will expect to be able to use your press to do just that.

Our experience has also been that the complexity of jobs in any particular sector is increasing over time, and the run lengths that people will want to print are shortening. Designing for current expectations may give you an under-powered solution in a few years’ time, maybe even by the time you ship your first digital press. Moore’s law, that computers will continue to deliver higher and higher performance at about the same price point, will cancel out some of that effect, but usually not all of it.

And if your next press will print with more inks, at a higher resolution, and at higher speed you may be surprised at how much impact that combination will have on the data rate requirements, and therefore possibly on the whole architecture of the Digital Front End to drive it.

And finally, the recommendations above implicitly assume that a suitable computer configuration is used. You won’t achieve 1GB/s output from multiple RIPs on a computer with a single, four-core CPU, for example. Key aspects of hardware affecting speed are: number of cores, CPU clock speed, disk space available, RAM available, disk read and write speed, band-width to memory, L2 and L3 cache sizes on the CPU and (especially for multi-server configurations) network speed and bandwidth.

Fortunately, the latest version of the Harlequin RIP offers a framework that can help you to meet all these requirements. It offers a complete scale of solutions from a single RIP through multiple RIPs on a single server, up to multiple RIPs across multiple servers.

 

The above is an excerpt from our latest white paper: Scalable performance with the Harlequin RIP. Download the white paper here.

Read Part I – Calculating data rates here.

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Choosing the class of your raster image processor (RIP) – Part I

Part I: How to calculate data rates

If you’re in the process of choosing or building a digital front end for your press, you’ll need to consider how much RIPing power you need for the capabilities of the press and the kinds of jobs that will be run on it. The RIP converts text and image data from many file formats including PDF, TIFF™ or JPEG into a format that a printing device such as an inkjet printhead, toner marking engine or laser platesetter can understand. But how do you know what RIP is best for you and what solution can best deliver maximum throughout on your output device? This is the first of two posts by Global Graphics Software’s CTO, Martin Bailey, where he advises how to size a solution for a digital press using the data rate required on the output side.

Over the years at Global Graphics Software, we’ve found that the best guidance we can give to our OEM partners in sizing digital press systems based on our own solution, the Harlequin RIP®, comes from a relatively simple calculation of the data rate required on the output side. And now we’re making a tool to calculate those data rates available to you. All you need to do is to download it from the web and to open it in Excel.

Download it here:  Global_Graphics_Software_Press_data_rates

You will, of course, also need the specifications of the press(es) that you want to calculate data rates for.

You can use the spreadsheet to calculate data rates based on pages per minute, web speed, sheets or square meters per minute or per hour, or on head frequency. Which is most appropriate for you depends on which market sector you’re selling your press into and where your focus is on the technical aspects of the press.

It calculates the data rate for delivering unscreened 8 bits per pixel (contone) rasters. This has proven to be a better metric for estimating RIP requirements than taking the bit depth of halftoned raster delivery into account. In practice Harlequin will run at about the same speed for 8-bit contone and for 1-bit halftone output because the extra work of halftoning is offset by the reduced volume of raster data to move around. Multi-level halftones delivered in 2-bit or 4-bit rasters take a little bit longer, but not enough to need to be considered here.

You can also use the sheet-fed calculation for conventional print platesetters if you so desire. You might find it eye-opening to compare data rate requirements for an offset or flexo platesetter with those for a typical digital press!

Fortunately, the latest version of the Harlequin RIP offers a framework that can help you to meet all these requirements. It offers a complete scale of solutions from a single RIP through multiple RIPs on a single server, up to multiple RIPs across multiple servers.

In my next post I’ll share how the data rate number can be used to make a first approximation of which class of RIP integration you should be considering.

 

The above is an excerpt from our latest white paper: Scalable performance with the Harlequin RIP®. Download the white paper here.