The new technology, which Cave describes as Digitally Modulated (DM) screening, draws on techniques from both AM and FM screening, but also does something "fundamentally different".

According to Cave, now chief executive of Hamillroad Software, the key difference is that DM screening looks at every single pixel in the context of the neighbouring pixels to see if there's anything that might induce problems on press, such as dot gain or patterning.

He said: "With the Digitally Modulated screening, you could perhaps call it a hybrid, but whereas the Agfa hybrid is a base AM with FM on top, I would say ours is an FM screen with some elements of AM on top."

Rather than tiling the output, we look at every single pixel that we're going to mark or not mark and we look at the neighbouring pixels over quite a large area to see if there's something that's going to induce patterning and if there is then we stop it by forcing a pixel to be off instead of on, or vice versa."

Cave added that the DM screening technology, which has been named Auraia after the Greek word for "beautiful", had only become feasible as a result of the vast increases in computing power in recent years.

"Five years ago this would not have been possible. It would have taken us 10 minutes to output a plate instead of 10 seconds," he said.

According to the company, the screening technology enables existing imaging optics to produce images that emulate the quality of a traditional 350lpi screen (using a 420lpi equivalent dot).

The Auraia screening module will initially be available for versions five, six, seven and eight of the Harlequin RIP from the beginning of November.