"Fifteen years ago, we thought driving computer-to-plate devices was challenging in terms of the speed we had to deliver data at – being able to RIP a plate in under 60 seconds was a major breakthrough," he said.
"But the new HP T400 inkjet web press prints 5,200 full-colour, letter-sized pages per minute at 600dpi, which if you do the maths means the DFE has to produce something like 8GB of raster per second. It’s mindblowing stuff."
The increasing use of transparency in graphic design and the trend towards increased variable data usage allied to the greater output speed of inkjet presses has led to a huge leap in data processing demands.
And while Bailey is confident that high-end DFEs will always be able to keep up with the speed demands of the newest crop of inkjet presses, this is not the sole consideration.
"The challenge isn’t just to be fast enough," said Bailey. "The real challenge is to achieve that goal without incurring an uneconomically high cost for the bill of materials to build the DFE.
"If the architecture of the DFE as a whole is well designed for very-high-speed throughput then it’s always going to be possible to build a DFE that will keep up with current presses.
"But, obviously the more you scale up [your processing power] the more expensive it is and even if you’ve spent several million pounds on a press, people are still rather sensitive about pricing on each individual part of the equipment."
Bailey added that, in some cases, DFEs can already run to "a significant proportion of the total cost of ownership of the system" and digital manufacturers are keen to keep this cost down without hampering the performance of their presses.
