If you’re looking for a digital front end to drive your high-speed, single-pass inkjet press, we invite you to join us at PRINTING United Expo 2023, where we will be showcasing SmartDFE™.
Winner of a prestigious 2023 PRINTING United Pinnacle Product Award in the Technology category, SmartDFE is a full software stack for high-speed, single-pass presses printing fully variable data.
Built upon Harlequin Direct™, the world’s fastest PDF RIP, and using patented components that leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning, it provides rasterization and inkjet drop generation for the best possible image quality and fastest printing speeds. Its automation capabilities provide complete control of the print workflow as well as valuable information for QA and inspection, press maintenance and stock control.
It will be the second time at PRINTING United that we will be exhibiting alongside our sister companies in Hybrid Software Group: ColorLogic GmbH, HYBRID Software, iC3D, Meteor Inkjet and Xitron.
“Hybrid Software Group is a unique resource for PRINTING United Expo 2023 attendees. Our software products have contributed to the success of many print providers, ranging from commercial printers to packaging converters as well as wide format/specialty printers. However, our six business units also provide vital OEM technologies to many vendors who use our products and know-how to create digital front ends for fast and powerful digital presses,” comments Mike Rottenborn, Hybrid Software Group PLC CEO.
Join us at the Industrial Print Integration conference
It’s my first time at the Industrial Print Integration Conference; I’ve packed my suitcase and my passport is raring to go, glad to be out of the drawer after two years of hibernation. I’m looking forward to meeting new people in the industry and learning about the new developments in technology.
If you’re interested in integrating print into your smart factory, join me for my talk at 12.30pm on Wednesday, 18 May 2022. I’ll be explaining how you integrate inkjet into the Smart Factory with the help of fully automated software that connects to the rest of the production system via Industry 4.0 technologies like OPC UA, the open standard for exchanging information for industrial communication. I’ll also explain how you can build in capability so you can deliver everything from mass production to mass customization at the same cost as current print systems.
And if you want to know more, then come along to our booth A7. We’re going to be showing a demo of our SmartDFE™, which I think is pretty impressive. You can watch a snippet here:
SmartDFE is our smart software that drives an inkjet printing subsystem in a factory setting, including those printers used for ultra-high speeds and 300m per minute production rates! The demo shows what happens when you combine high-tech SCADA systems (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) with OPC UA to monitor and control virtual print subsystems via iPads. You can control them both inside and outside of your plant location so management always knows what’s happening without ever having be physically present.
Ian Bolton, Product Manager – SmartDFE™ and Direct™
Ian Bolton is the product manager for SmartDFE™ and Direct™. He works with printer OEMs to break down barriers that might be preventing them from reaching their digital printer’s full potential. A software engineer at heart, Ian has a masters in Advanced Computer Science from the University of Manchester, and over 15 years’ experience developing software for both start-ups and large corporations, such as Arm and Sony Ericsson. He draws on this technical background and his passion for problem-solving to define and drive features and requirements for innovative software solutions for digital print.
Be the first to receive our blog posts, news updates and product news. Why not subscribe to our monthly newsletter? Subscribe here
If you’re building a digital press, or a digital front end (DFE) to drive a digital press, you want it to be as efficient and cost-effective as possible. As the trend towards printing short runs and personalization grows, especially in combination with increasing resolutions, more colorants and faster presses, the speed and scalability of the raster image processor (RIP) inside that DFE are key factors in determining profitability.
For your digital press to print at speed you’ll need to understand the amount of data that it requires, i.e. its data rate. In this film, Martin Bailey, distinguished technologist at Global Graphics Software, explains how different stages in data handling will need different data rates and how to integrate the appropriate number of RIP cores to generate that much data without inflating the bill of materials and DFE hardware.
Martin also explains that your next press may have a much higher data rate requirement than your current one.
In this latest case study, Tom Bouman, worldwide workflow product marketing manager at HP PageWide Industrial, explains why the Harlequin RIP®, with its track record for high quality and speed and its ability to scale, was the obvious choice to use at the heart of its digital front end when the division was set up to develop presses for the industrial inkjet market back in 2008.
Today, the Harlequin RIP Core is at the heart of all the PageWide T-series presses, driving the HP Production Elite Print Server digital front end. Presses range from 20-inch for commercial printing, through to the large 110-inch (T1100 series) printers for high-volume corrugated pre-print, offering a truly scalable solution that sets the standard in performance and quality.
Product manager Paul Dormer gives an insight into why the Harlequin Core is the leading print OEMs’ first choice to power digital inkjet presses in this new film.
A raster image processor (RIP), Harlequin Core converts text, object and image data from file formats such as PDF, TIFF™ or JPEG, into a raster that a printing device can understand. It’s at the heart of the digital front end that drives the press.
Proven in the field for decades, Harlequin Core is known for its incredible speed and is the fastest RIP engine available. It is used in every print sector, from industrial inkjet such as textiles and flooring, to labels and packaging, commercial, transactional, and newspapers.
As presses become wider, faster, and higher resolution, handling vast amounts of data, the Harlequin Core remains the RIP of choice for many leading brands including HP, Mimaki, Mutoh, Roland, Durst, Agfa and Delphax.
We’ve now been shipping the Harlequin Host Renderer™ (HHR) to OEMs and partners for over a decade, driving digital printers and presses. Back then Harlequin was our only substantial software component for use in digital front ends (DFEs), and we just came up with a name that seemed to describe what it did.
Since then our technology set includes a component that can be used upstream of the RIP, for creating, modifying, analyzing, visualizing, etc page description languages like PDF: that’s Mako™. And we’ve also added a high-performance halftone screening engine: ScreenPro™.
We’ve positioned these components as a “Core” range and their names reflect this: “Mako Core” and “ScreenPro Core”. We also added higher level components in our Direct™ range, for printer OEMs who don’t want to dig into the complexities of system engineering, or who want to get to market faster.
Harlequin is already part of Harlequin Direct™, and we’re now amending the name of the SDK to bring it into line with our other “Core” component technologies. The diagram below shows how those various offerings fit together for a wide range of digital printer and press vendors (please click on it for a better view).
So, farewell “Harlequin Host Renderer”, hello “Harlequin Core”.
This week WhatTheyThink launched its 2021 Technology Outlook – a resource guide designed for you to quickly learn about new innovations from industry analysts and thought leaders. It includes five technology focus areas: digital printing, labels & packaging, software & workflow, wide format & signage and textiles & apparel, and finishing.
As part of the software & workflow technology focus, David Zwang of WhatTheyThink chatted to our VP of products and services, Eric Worrall, about digital front ends (DFEs), the elements that comprise a DFE, and the recent launch of Global Graphics’ SmartDFE™, a complete single-source software and electronics stack that does everything from job creation through to printhead electronics, and a vital component in the smart factory of the future. Smart factories are designed to autonomously run the entire production process and this will include the print subsystems.
Watch it here:
Global Graphics Software’s Eric Worrall talking about Smart DFEs
To find out more about the smart factory and the smart digital front end, visit our website.
Be the first to receive our news updates and product news. Why not subscribe to our monthly newsletter? Subscribe here
The impact of poorly constructed PDF files on production schedules has increased as press resolution, colorant count, speed, and width rise – greatly increasing the data rate required to drive them.
This increase in data places additional demands on the processing power of the DFE and risks slowing down the digital press: a delay of half a second on every page of a 10,000-page job adds 90 minutes to the whole job, while for a job of a million pages an extra tenth of a second per page adds 24 hours to the total processing time.
In his guide: Full Speed Ahead – How to make variable data PDF files that won’t slow your digital press, Martin Bailey, distinguished technologist at Global Graphics Software, gives some technical recommendations as to how you can make sure that you don’t make a PDF file for a variable data job that will bring a digital press to its knees. It provides objective information for graphic designers, print buyers, production managers, press operators, owners of PSPs, and developers of digital presses and composition tools.
Martin has just released a second edition of the guide and in this film he talks about the updates to Digimarc‘s marketing communications manager, Rob Fay. Digimarc provides additional functionality to Global Graphics’ software platforms and is a sponsor of the guide.
Topics in the interview include:
The guide’s purpose and target audiences
Background on updates related to the standards PDF/X-6 and PDF/VT-3
Differences in the various VDP applications: traceability; trackability; and personalization
Recent improvements in DFE (digital front end) technology that are enabling more advanced VDP
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
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.
Ian Bolton, Product Manager – DirectIan 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.
To be the first to receive our blog posts, news updates and product news why not subscribe to our monthly newsletter? Subscribe here
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:
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
