All HP Indigo presses in the Pavilion at Labelexpo Europe are being powered by the Harlequin RIP inside the HP Production Pro for Indigo Labels and Packaging which has become the default digital front end for the full product range.

The HP Production Pro drives the new HP Indigo 6900 as well as the HP Indigo 8000, the HP Indigo 20000 and the HP Indigo 30000 presses.  These presses produce labels, folding cartons, flexible packaging and shrink sleeves, and require a powerful digital front end to produce the performance and versatility that converters and print shops need, especially as more and more variability is used in this sector.

The HP Indigo GEM that allows printing and embellishment of digital, variable embellishments such as foil, spot, tactile, cast & cure, and special effects, is also driven from the HP Production Pro digital front end. This means that the same RIP is used for both print and embellishment, ensuring a good match between the two.

With a high proportion of print jobs being repeats in this market, Global Graphics and HP Indigo have collaborated to ensure that converters who install a new press alongside an existing model will be able to match the output. They will also be able to achieve the same color, including emulated brand colors, while benefiting from the speed advantages that the Harlequin RIP brings.

Martin Bailey, Global Graphics CTO and Harlequin product manager comments, “Harlequin has been used in Indigo’s Production Pro digital front end for their commercial presses for a long time, so it was a strong endorsement for the quality of our product and our collaborative approach to working with printer vendors when HP Indigo chose to use Harlequin for labels and packaging as well. It’s great to reach the point where the whole of the Indigo fleet in the HP pavilion at LabelExpo is showing off the power and flexibility of our combined solution.”

The HP Indigo commercial presses are known for their exceptional “digital offset” quality and high productivity and are used for a wide variety of applications such as photobooks, direct marketing and publishing.

HP Production Pro is built on the field-proven foundations of Production Pro with the Harlequin RIP, Esko Color Engine, and PrintOS cloud connectivity. The Production Pro provides a single point of control to the press operator to streamline and manage the print workflow.  It allows extra performance to be added to HP Indigo digital presses when required because it offers a unique capability of scaling up the RIP hardware to increase RIP capacity even further and control multiple presses from a single rack server.

The Harlequin RIP is known for its high-performance and reliability, notably in production intensive environments.  It is the industry benchmark for speed even as workflows become more complex, carrying larger amounts of data than ever before.  While the use of variable data is still a relatively small proportion of label and packaging print it is expected to grow and Harlequin’s feature for processing these files – Harlequin VariData – will ensure that print jobs continue to be RIPped at speed.