Eric Worrall has been with the company since 2004 and currently leads the Product Management and Technical Services teams. He has had a wide experience of key roles including Senior Software Developer, Technical Support, Sales Engineer and Product Manager which puts him in an ideal place to understand the complete software business. Eric leads the product strategy, position and vision within Global Graphics.

Prior to joining Global Graphics Eric spent two years’ post graduate research at the University of Leicester focusing on speech recognition in adverse noise environments. He worked in engineering and project management roles for both Marconi and Videojet. He has over twenty years of market knowledge in printing, digital documents, machine vision technologies. Eric has five US Patents and a BEng (Hons) in Electronic and Electrical Engineering.

Understanding the Impact of the Software and Hardware Components that Drive Your Digital Press

Eric Worrall, Global Graphics Software

As digital printers advance to become faster, wider and higher resolution, supporting an extended gamut of colorants and growing range of drop sizes, the data rates required to drive them at full-rated line speed can increase significantly. Workflows that use intermediate files on disk have already hit this data rate barrier, but, even without that bottleneck, printer manufacturers require the right combination of software and PC hardware to rise to this challenge whilst keeping their total bill of materials down.

In this paper, we will discuss the complexities of selecting the software and hardware components at the heart of a workflow designed to process PDF jobs in real-time to stream data to directly to the printhead electronics. We will look at aspects such as clock speed, number of cores, number of physical CPUs, memory speed and capacity, and how they all interact to determine the line speeds that can achieved for varying inputs.

Finally, we will share why we felt it was important to develop a tool to facilitate the collection of data to understand this challenge further.