InkJet Age

JUN 2014

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www.MyPRINTResource.com JUNE 2014 • INKJET'S AGE 17 A s more high-speed inkjet presses come on the market, offering buyers a pleth- ora of choices, the digital front end is becoming more important in the press purchasing process, as well as in production once the press has been installed. The front end directly impacts how successfully a job is brought on board, pre-flighted, printed, finished, and delivered, said Pat McGrew, inkjet evangelist, inkjet high- speed production solutions, HP. The goal is to ensure that every investment made supports the larger investment in the inkjet web press. "Press vendors often integrate a collection of technolo- gies from various suppliers to build a DFE; the feature set and quality of the output depend as much on their selection of those technologies as it does on how well they integrate them all together—and on the press itself," added Martin Bailey, chief technology officer, Global Graphics. Most production inkjet systems are high-end production ma- chines, where the speed/performance of RIP technology is key to keeping the engines productive without clutching. The front-end solution must be robust and reliable to support production level expectations of a 24/7 heavy load use, as well as efficiently run data-driven applications, such as variable data and imaging. Key features are fantastic throughput to minimize bottlenecks, enterprise visibility, interconnectivity, and event notification, said Ed Jansen, vice president professional services, Canon Solutions America. "The solution must also support the shift towards dy- namic communications and multichannel output and leverage the latest advances in data formats." Speed and performance dovetail with automation, an extremely important feature within a full production system, Jason Kammes, business development manager-workflow solutions, Fujifilm North America Corporation, Graphic Systems Division. Jobs need to come in and out as quickly as possible with little involvement or "touches" from production staff in order to increase profit with workloads that involve much shorter runs. A critical consideration is color management software built for inkjet environments and pre-flight software that can understand customer ICC profiles. DFEs must handle color management suit- ably for the press to match brand colors and maximize use of the press gamut, while producing naturalistic photographic images. "Aqueous inkjet presses often have a very low maximum total area coverage compared with what might be considered normal in traditional graphic arts, which can put a strain on some color en- gines," said Bailey. Question vendors about current links and APIs into MIS and other job management tools, and don't forget to ask about the long-term upgrade strategy as new standards come online, said Mc- Grew. "Even more than the press itself, the front end is what en- ables print service providers to say 'yes' to complex jobs and prepare them perfectly for the press to produce." Additional "must-have" features also include single-path process without multi-step conversion to minimize conversion errors and the ability to support multiple PDLs natively, said Joe Rouhana, general manager, production workflow & solutions, graphic com- munications, Xerox. High Performing Digital Front Ends Required for Today's Crop of Inkjet Presses By JOANN WHITCHER HP SMARTSTREAM Production Center is a software-based digital production management system designed to address the challenges of efficiently receiving, producing, and delivering high volumes of short-run digital print jobs. QPsupp_17-18_0614 Prepress.indd 17 5/15/14 11:57 AM

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