Ditch the disk: a new generation of RIPs to drive your digital press

Vast amounts of data can slow down your digital press resulting in wasted product or delayed delivery times.
Vast amounts of data can slow down your digital press resulting in wasted product or delayed delivery times.

In this post, Global Graphics Software’s product manager for Mako, David Stevenson, explores the challenge of printing large amounts of raster data and the options available to ensure that data doesn’t slow down your digital press:

The print market is increasingly moving to digital: digital printing offers many advantages over conventional printing, the most valuable of these is mass-produced, personalized output making every copy of the print different. At the same time  digital presses are getting faster, wider, and printing at higher resolutions with extended gamut color becoming common place.

To drive the new class of digital presses, you need vast amounts of raster data every second. Traditional print software designed for non-digital workflows attempts to handle this vast amount of data by RIPping ahead, storing rasters to physical disks. However, the rate at which data is needed for the digital press causes disk-based workflows to rapidly hit the data rate boundary. This is the point where even state-of-the-art storage devices are simply too small and slow for the huge data rates required to keep the press running at full rated speed.

This is leading to a new generation of RIPs that ditch the disk and RIP print jobs on the fly directly to the press electronics. As well as driving much higher data rates, it also has the benefit of no wasted time RIPping ahead.

As you can imagine, RIPping directly to the press electronics presents some engineering challenges. For example, two print jobs may look identical before and after printing, but the way in which they have been made can cause them to RIP at very different rates. Additionally, your RIP of choice can have optimizations that make jobs constructed in certain ways to RIP faster or slower. This variability in print job and RIP time is a bit like playing a game of Russian roulette: if you lose the press will be starved of data causing wasted product or delivery delays.

With a RIP driving your press directly you need to have confidence that all jobs submitted can be printed at full speed. That means you need the performance of each print job and page to be predictable and you need to know what speed the press can be run at for a given combination of print Job, RIP and PC.

Knowing this, you may choose to slow down the press so that your RIP can keep up. Better still, keep the press running at full speed by streamlining the job with knowledge of optimizations that work well with your choice of RIP.

Or you could choose to return the print job to the generator with a report explaining what is causing it to run slowly. Armed with this information, the generator can rebuild the job, optimized for your chosen RIP.

Whatever you choose, you will need predictable print jobs to drive your press at the highest speed to maximize your digital press’s productivity.

If you want to know more about the kind of job objects and structure that can slow RIPs down, and the challenge of producing predictable jobs, download this guide: Full Speed Ahead – how to make variable data PDF files that won’t slow your digital press.

You can also find out more about software to optimize both PDFs and non-PDFs for your digital press by visiting our website.

Further reading:

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

Future-proofing your digital press to cope with rising data rates

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How do I choose the right PC specification for my digital press workflow?

When planning the implementation of your first or next digital press, the PC specification you choose to run your software workflow will play an important part in the data rates you will be able to achieve. Assuming you are not bottlenecked by disk drive performance due to requiring intermediate disk accesses, you can generally expect data rates to rise with the computational power of your PC.

It might therefore make sense to review the PassMark scores for a range of CPUs within your budget and make your choice based on that, but this alone won’t be enough to tell you whether you’ll be able to drive your printer at full rated speed. Similarly, you may already have an existing PC system in mind but need to know if it will be powerful enough for your new requirements.

Ideally, you could set up an evaluation system to run some typical print jobs to get a definitive answer, but this could be costly and labor-intensive, especially if this is your first digital press.

It’s for this reason we created Direct Benchmark™: an analysis tool that exercises Harlequin Direct™, our ultra-high data rate RIPping and screening solution, with your choice of press configuration and print jobs, stepping through a tuning cycle to obtain a series of data rates and line speeds that can be achieved.

There are two main ways Direct Benchmark can help you: firstly, if you have an existing PC system to run on, you can install Direct Benchmark and gather your own results; secondly, you could base your decision on a database of Direct Benchmark results we are gathering here at Global Graphics Software from running a variety of jobs on a range of PC specifications.

Running Direct Benchmark yourself

Whilst a real Harlequin Direct system would be connected to printhead electronics and driving your press directly, the Harlequin Direct invoked by Direct Benchmark doesn’t require this connection. This makes it very quick and easy to install and start gathering performance numbers. The screenshot below shows the settings you can use to reflect your printer configuration and define the print jobs to benchmark.

During benchmarking, you will be presented with a screen showing statistics for each run and a real-time graph of data rate at the bottom, and then you will be able to export the results at the end. If you would like to see Direct Benchmark in action, you can view a short demo here:

Using the Direct Benchmark database

If you aren’t in a position to run Direct Benchmark yourself, we are in the process of gathering results for a range of press configurations and print jobs, running on a variety of PC hardware specifications. This is being conducted in conjunction with Proactive Technologies, who are providing access to some of the machines we’re using. Whilst it is too early to draw any conclusions or share our results at this stage, if you have some typical print jobs and a press configuration in mind, please get in touch with me, ian.bolton@globalgraphics.com, because we may be able to generate the results for you.

For more information about Direct, please visit globalgraphics.com/direct

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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.