PALO ALTO, Calif., Sept. 2, 2005—HP today announced the availability of the HP RIP Expansion Rack, an off-press hardware and software solution that dramatically increases the raster image processor (RIP) capabilities for the popular HP Indigo press 5000. With this new enhancement, users of the HP Indigo press 5000 gain multiple timesaving options in their operations. “The HP Indigo press 5000 represents the top tier of what is available in terms of digital print quality and variable-data output capability on the market today,” said Alon Bar-Shany, vice president and general manager, Indigo division, HP. “This latest addition to the HP Indigo press 5000 ensures a high level of scalability with the HP Press Production Manager. It is also ideally suited to help create the printing success stories of the future, providing the processing power that will enable our customers to stay on the leading edge of the rapidly growing market for database-driven variable-data communications and image intensive photo-related applications.” Easy-to-use, high-performance tools The HP RIP Expansion Rack is designed to integrate with a single HP Indigo press 5000, and can virtually eliminate the need for downtime between jobs. The RIP power for the HP Indigo press 5000 can be custom tailored with the HP RIP Expansion Rack to meet the exact needs of the commercial print shop, maximizing press utilization and ROI. Through its software, the HP RIP Expansion Rack boosts the performance of the HP Indigo press 5000 by combining the processing power of the on-press RIP with the RIP or RIPs configured in the rack. This additional RIPing horsepower provides the ability to perform concurrent RIPing, where the processing of a large job is sent across multiple processors. The HP RIP Expansion Rack can also RIP multiple jobs in parallel; it can be configured so that jobs are automatically sent to different processors for fast, efficient and reliable data preparation. This flexibility keeps jobs running on the press regardless of the size and number of files that need to be processed. Available in single, dual, and quad-RIP configurations, the HP RIP Expansion Rack can employ one, two or four Harlequin RIPs based on the performance level desired. The Harlequin RIP provides consistent performance and, with its Windows XP Pro user interface, the HP RIP Expansion Rack is simple to use. A tool for print shop growth in volume and variable-data The HP RIP Expansion Rack is ideally suited for HP Indigo press 5000 users operating moderately large to extra large volumes of PostScript, PDF, or Personalized Production Markup Language (PPML) jobs per shift on a single press. Each version of the HP RIP Expansion Rack is equipped with up to four Harlequin version 7.0 RIPs, Win2003 standard edition server software, and Symantec Antivirus software. Hardware components include HP Proliant DL320 Generation 3 servers rack-mounted with Intel Pentium 4 technology, a 3.4 GHz processor, 800 MHz FSB and Hyper-Threading Technology, DVD/ROM drive components, rack-mounted keyboard and a 15” monitor.