Sharon, Massachusetts – Rampage LLC (www.rampage-llc.com) is pleased to announce it has granted a license to Global Graphics Software for use of Rampage US Patent Nos. 9,053,410, 9,734,440, and 9,278,566 which cover the Quantone™ processing methods of screening and compensation for multiple gray-level digital presses and automatic print head registration.
Says inventor and Rampage LLC managing member Mitch Bogart, “We chose to make the licensing of our portfolio not exclusive to rip vendors so that others in the digital printing industry may benefit. This include both rip integrators as well as OEMs of digital presses and printers.” Bogart describes the advantages of the technology,
“Quantone™ screening provides accurate, precise, and stable calibration and compensation for any digital press or printer having ‘variable dot size’ or ‘2 or more bits per pixel. It leverages any bi-level screening algorithm and provides higher image smoothness, lower screening noise, and higher speed. It easily adapts to any resolution and any pixel bit depth. The simplified registration method applies to any digital press having multiple print heads. It works by moving the data rather than moving the print heads.
We look forward to more collaboration with industry leader Global Graphics to further enable them to provide the highest features, qualities, and speeds to their digital printer and digital press OEM customers.”
Global Graphics’ related products include the Harlequin RIP®, ScreenPro, Harlequin Multi-level Screening Engine, Fundamentals, and Mako.
“We think the inkjet industry will welcome these inventions” says Gary Fry, the CEO of Global Graphics. “They will sit well alongside our own inventions in screening and calibration technology and are an important consideration for anyone looking at high-speed inkjet technology.”
Regarding high-speed, digital press OEMs have an exciting additional opportunity when going Quantone™. Mitch shares his vision to explain why.
“Rampage LLC will soon be offering OEMs an updated version of the GPU-based Quantone™ implementation option, demonstrated to a major digital press vendor, at the former Rampage Systems, Inc., where Bogart was co-founder and Director of R&D”.
Bogart’s vision of future digital printing control could be described as a super-ROOM, in other words, a “Rip Once Output Many system on a GPU supercomputer foundation. “I have always been an advocate of using advanced electronics for imaging” says Bogart. “Where we are today is that a single PC filled with off-the-shelf GPU accelerator boards can have over 20,000 parallel GPU cores and 128 GB of memory with an internal transfer rate of over 3 terabytes per second! This is some serious overkill, as even a single-board super-ROOM system will keep up with the fastest digital presses available today. With all ripped data for flats and pages in GPU memory, and all GPU cores running the Quantone™ process simultaneously, each copy can be individually screened, re-calibrated, and re-registered, all on-the-fly at the speed of the high speed press” according to Bogart.
As those with “ink under their fingernails” know, in the world of printing, time is money. An expensive high speed digital press just should not be idle, waiting for calculations. If this is true also for digital printing, Bogart’s vision is just what the industry ordered.
Rampage LLC invites all OEMs, and rip integrators, to share their vision and contact Rampage LLC to see how our Quantone™ portfolio, which we extend, maintain, and defend, can be a part of it.