Unrivaled speed

Harlequin Host Renderer drives the industry’s highest performing digital presses, consuming up to 45 GB of raster data per second!

It contains a host of features designed to optimize data throughput. Speed is a key focus of the Harlequin development team, because a faster RIP enables presses with very high data rates to be driven at engine speed and reduces the bill of materials for a digital front end (DFE) or controller.

That’s because with a faster RIP you can drive high volume devices with fewer RIPs and you require less hardware. You can run on Linux too, as well as Windows, reducing licensing costs.

Achieving speed

Our developers optimize the code for high speed, avoiding large amounts of unnecessary processing. Among the techniques for achieving speed are: highly efficient interfaces for RIP configuration, control and tracking; 64-bit processing gaining access to a larger addressable memory space and more efficient data transfers; flexibility in memory management so as to avoid the need for a data copy post-RIP.

Multi-threading

Multi-threading with Harlequin Parallel Pages allows maximum use to be made of both work station and server grade multi-core CPUs ensuring the highest possible throughput. Harlequin uses multiple threads for parallelizable processes such as transparency compositing and rendering, processing multiple bands at the same time on different cores. This means that all of the cores in a processor are working harder for a much larger proportion of time, squeezing out maximum performance.

Variable data

Processing speed is especially important when variable data print jobs are being processed. If every page, label, package or image is different, then it must be processed individually and at engine speed.Harlequin VariData™ identifies intelligently graphics that are used multiple times. (It is not limited to only selecting Forms or Images in PDF files, and will amend the order of graphics on the page to maximise efficiency.)

RIP farms

The Harlequin Scalable RIP is a framework that expands support for systems using multiple RIPs. It is designed to support press vendors in building higher and higher speed digital front ends to drive faster and faster presses. It gives press vendors access to a complete scale of solutions from a single RIP, through multiple RIPs on a single server, up to multiple RIPs across multiple servers.

Tiling for speed

Harlequin Host renderer can split very large pages into tiles automatically, allowing a single page to be processed by multiple RIPs in parallel. Working on tiles also reduces the peak memory usage, enabling huge pages to be processed at full speed without a huge bill of materials for the DFE platform.