Scoops industry award for outstanding achievement in innovation

Cambridge UK and Sarasota, Fla. – Global Graphics Software, a leading developer of core technology for digital print including the Harlequin RIP®, has won a 2021 Buyers Lab (BLI) Outstanding Innovation award in Production Print from Keypoint Intelligence for its Direct range. Direct is a new graphics pipeline that sends data directly to the inkjet printhead electronics, removing the intermediate step of writing to disk. As a result, image processing times are significantly reduced, large volumes of data are handled with ease, and the time to print is accelerated.

“Global Graphics’ Direct technology is a new and innovative approach within the industrial inkjet market to solve the accelerating data needs of digital presses,” says Ryan McAbee, Keypoint Intelligence’s director of production workflow solutions. “Instead of writing data to an intermediary disk, data can be sent directly to the printhead electronics, which saves time and reduces the required computing storage resources—a win-win for customers.”

Global Graphics Software has been on a winning streak in recent years having been awarded a 2020 Queens Award for Enterprise recognising innovation in developing ScreenPro™ with PrintFlat™ and is in the rare position of being a recipient of the PIA InterTech™ Technology Award for Innovation on two consecutive years in 2019 and 2018.

Judging for the BLI Innovation award distinguishes a technology for its ability to disrupt old processes with a new approach to productivity, improve output consistency, improved automation, and to increase speed and efficiencies.

Justin Bailey, managing director of Global Graphics Software, said, “We are really excited to bring our unique Direct technology to the industrial inkjet market, so that the printing components of a manufacturing line can be driven as fast as the printer engine allows. These manufacturing lines need to be robust enough to run at full speed 24/7, and to be prepared to print where there is a very high predominance of variable data where every item is different. This new demanding way of printing required us to think about a new technology architecture to eliminate the need to read and write from disk, which helps with productivity and reduces the hardware requirements for our customers.”

Direct is a new graphics pipeline that sends data directly to the printhead electronics instead of writing to disk.