28 ■ October 6, 2010 • GRAPH EXPO
Official Show Daily • Cygnus Graphics Media
Out of the Lab and into Your Pressroom
HP Labs innovations streamline design and improve quality on new digital printing products
S
olutions from imaging sci- ence’s leading edge are mak- ing their way to offset-qual- ity digital color commercial
print production. A pair of new digital color production printing solutions at GRAPH EXPO 2010—the HP Indigo 7500 digital press and HP SmartStream Designer
version 5—
feature innovative tech- nologies from HP Labs. HP Labs
developed
print quality monitor- ing solutions that help improve quality, reliabil- ity and press uptime as part of new Intelligent Automation and Vision System features on the
HP Indigo 7500. Scientists at HP Labs Israel worked with members of HP’s Israel-based Indigo division Research & Development team to develop the Vision System concept, with HP Labs providing the algorithms that allow for closed loop print quality.
An in-line scanner on the HP Indigo 7500 serves as the start point for an automated print quality diagnostics system that analyzes test jobs to deter- mine the root cause of a print quality issue. Automation is the key factor, as the system is designed to be fast- er, cheaper and more consistent than human operators. With its new auto- mation and scanning features, the HP Indigo 7500 digital press features real time early defect detection technology that identifies print defects and notifies the operator.
Print-to-file comparisons Beyond early defect detection, HP Labs helped create a one of a kind solution for the digital color printing space: a print quality inspection system that can examine customer jobs and compare static and variable data con- tent against original image files. The main challenge that the Labs
team had to overcome was the fact that scanned customer jobs are vastly dif- ferent from their originals. Differences span technical differences caused by the print and scan processes, and fun- damental differences related to color science that normally limit the amount of information a scanner receives. HP Labs dedicated a significant amount of research to address these challenges. The inspection system shown on the HP Indigo 7500 at GRAPH EXPO employs perceptual image difference algorithms that can
as a plug-in for designers using Adobe InDesign CS5 and as a full featured software package for print service pro- viders—includes a completely new technology from HP Labs, a Smart Fit software feature that fits images to frames proportionately. In cases where an imported image is too small to fit a frame, Smart Fit is able to identify the main figure in an image, proportion- ately enlarge that main figure to a scale that makes it ideal for the image frame, and then enlarge the background of an image to a different scale to ensure the entire frame is filled.
Image enhancement HP SmartStream Designer 5 also has HP Labs developed auto-photo image correction features originally launched on the HP SmartStream Pho- to Enhancement Server.
These automated image enhance- ment tools help HP Indigo custom- ers print higher quality photo images by performing a series of key image optimization procedures. Specifically, the photo image enhancement tools include proprietary algorithms to detect faults and improve image qual- ity factors through automated image sharpening,
image smoothing, con-
tract and brightness adjustment, JPEG artifact reduction and shadow detail enhancement.
HP Labs Israel is an excellence cen- ter in imaging science, learning and automation technologies, and work- flow automation for commercial print- ing is one its key research areas. Labs staff work to overcome technical gaps in the industry, developing solutions that improve the level of reliability, quality and automation available in digital printing.
HP Indigo 7500
discriminate differences in a manner similar to human perception.
Smart Fit debuts HP Labs has also made significant
improvements to digital color produc- tion workflows. The new version 5 of HP SmartStream Designer—available
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