Visitors to the InfoTrends breakfast meeting at Graph Expo on October 8th will learn about the power of the new Harlequin "digital" RIP to drive high- speed digital presses in a White Paper that is being distributed at the event.

The InfoTrends White Paper contains the results of independent speed tests carried out by the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) on the Harlequin Host Renderer. The results confirm that the Harlequin Host Renderer has so much processing speed that it not only reduces the risk of poorly constructed jobs slowing down production but exceeds industry requirements in keeping presses running at full speed.

This amount of power has benefits for press manufacturers in potentially reducing their bill of materials for the Digital Front Ends driving presses. It benefits print shops by providing a faster return on press investment and future-proofing their operation against the accelerating trend towards personalization of data.

"The high-speed digital print production market is in full development", says Kaspar Roos, associate director, InfoTrends. "We can expect future products to be faster, wider, use more colorants, or print at higher resolution. All of this puts tremendous requirements on the RIP. Our speed test showed that Global Graphics has highly efficient and robust technology to play in this market. OEMs developing high-speed, high-volume printing equipment should consider adding Global Graphics to their evaluation list when sourcing RIP technology"

The tests were conducted by RIT's School of Media, under the auspices of Administrative Chair and Gannett Distinguished Professor, Chris Bondy. The test file suite, developed by RIT, comprised files created using Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, XMPie and GMC, selected to provide a good representation of the standard production tools used to create static and variable data pages for six sample categories - label printing, direct mail, transactional printing, commercial printing, publications and photo books.

The White Paper is also available for download from http://www.globalgraphics.com/hhr3.

Speed test results
The speed tests show that the Harlequin Host Renderer delivers:

Label printing

• Over 20 times the rate required by the leading label press using one RIP;

Transactional/direct mail (variable data printing)

• 4 times faster than the rate required by the leading continuous feed color devices using a server with 10 RIPs;
• 5 times faster than the leading toner cut-sheet color devices using one RIP;

Commercial (assuming a minimum run length of 20 copies)

• 11 times faster than the rate required by the leading full-color, cut-sheet device;
• 20 times faster than the rate required by high-end MFP cut-sheet color devices using one RIP;

Publication (assuming a minimum run length of 20 copies)

• 11 times faster than the rate required by an ultra-high volume wide-web inkjet press with a server of 10 RIPs;
• 24 times faster than the rate required by a medium volume, full-color graphic arts production press with one RIP.

New features
The Harlequin Host Renderer provides high performance components with which to build Digital Front Ends for digital production presses. A number of new features in Version 3 increase processing power so that pages pass through the RIP at a faster pace than ever before:

• Harlequin Parallel Pages allows the RIP to interpret one page while it's still rendering the previous one. This allows print shops to take maximum advantage of multi-core computers.
• Harlequin VariData accelerates the processing time of regular PDF files containing variable data including, but not only, PDF/VT files.
• The Harlequin Host Renderer is also available as a 64-bit build to access additional memory when it's needed for pages with large amounts of data.

Press manufacturers who use Harlequin to drive their digital presses include HP Indigo, and HP inkjet web division, Tokyo Kikai Seisakusho and Miyakoshi Printing Machinery.