Summit Partner Spotlight: Global Graphics

The second FuturePrint Virtual Summit will be taking place from October 12th to October 16th. Global Graphics is a FuturePrint Virtual Summit Content Partner, and we caught up with the team to discuss their software solutions, inkjet trends, and what attendees of the summit can expect from their content.

Jeremy Spencer, Global Graphics

Why has your business made the decision to participate in the second FuturePrint Virtual Summit? 

Planning out the software for your industrial inkjet press is often an area that is overlooked or underestimated.  We have a lot of expertise and application knowledge that we felt we should share this time around, because you don’t often hear much about the value the software in your digital press can add to your solution.  Our broad experience - be it in  digital corrugated, textiles or wall coverings – led us to decide to make our session part educational, part product focus.

Who will be representing you at the FuturePrint Virtual Summit and what is their responsibility and experience?

We’re delighted that our team includes our Chief Technology Officer Martin Bailey, our VP of Business Development Jeremy Spencer, and the Product Manager for the Direct range Ian Bolton.

Martin has more years’ experience than he would like us to mention (so we will - about 30 years actually). He works to analyze and understand current and future needs for document and print workflows. He represents Global Graphics on a number of industry bodies and standards committees including acting as the primary UK expert on the committees working on PDF/A, PDF and PDF/VT.

Jeremy works closely with our industrial inkjet customers, principally in Europe, these include Ricoh, Barberan, Durst, and Inedit and has more than 25 years’ experience.  He will share his knowledge of what’s really happening in the field.

Ian brought with him 15 years of high performance software experience when he joined us in 2019, and is now applying this as part of his role of Product Manager for Direct to help OEMs to break down any new technology barriers that may be preventing them from reaching their digital printer’s full potential.  

Can you provide a brief overview of your chosen topic and why it will be of interest and relevance to Summit attendees? 

We’re going to start off by talking about the upwards trend in the data rates being sent to inkjet printheads as job requirements become more complex.  In some sectors this might be due to mass personalisation.  In others higher resolutions, more ink channels and wider presses are resulting in more data that the press has to process.  Software is the key to keeping presses running at rated engine speeds and at the optimum quality output.  We’ll cover what is meant by digital press software and what you should expect to find in the digital front end (DFE) that drives a press. We’ll close by discussing a new graphics pipeline that drives Direct, which 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.

How do you see the market developing in the next six months, and what will be your focus? 

Our focus is our work with OEM customers to ensure that their presses meet the requirements of their market. Industry data rates are accelerating: press resolutions are moving from 600dpi to 1200dpi, a quadrupling of data; speeds are increasing to up to one thousand feet per minute/300 metres per minute; presses can be up to 13 feet /4 metres wide; and extended gamut inks use many more ink channels than previously with multi-level screening up to 7 drop sizes on inkjet presses. 

Tell us more about the product and the specific market it serves.

We’re lucky to work closely with manufacturers on presses that might not hit the market for two or three more years which gives us a good view into the future.  It’s against this background of the next generation presses needing to process huge amounts of data as they become faster, wider and higher resolution that we’ve introduced our Direct range.

We’ll close our session with reference to Direct, a new graphics pipeline that sends data directly to the inkjet printhead electronics. It disrupts current processes because it removes the need to write to disk as an intermediate step: image processing times are significantly reduced; large volumes of data are handled with ease; and the time to print is accelerated. Direct integrates together several technologies from Global Graphics Software to give the optimal speed gains and efficiencies. Plus it’s been designed to be part of a fully automated print solution, supporting Industry 4.0 telematics and integration with PLCs and MIS systems, where feedback from the print line such as a quality inspection system, can help automatically correct for any issues as they occur

What is unique about this product? How will it make a difference for customers?

Writing to disk causes bottlenecks for the ultra-high data rates required for next generation presses. Storing RIP output to disk before being able to start screening and printing means there is a delay before the press can start printing. Quite simply, Direct removes the need to write to disk.  And because Direct has been engineered to meet the demands of fully variable data from the outset, it gives manufacturers the option to use lower performance PC hardware for less demanding (static or mixed data) jobs.  This is achieved by RIPping on the fly and streaming image data in memory directly to the printer electronics so there is no need to waste the time to RIP ahead to disk and no need for huge image stores holding vast amounts of data. 

You can learn more about the FuturePrint Virtual Summit here.

You can learn more about Global Graphics here.