The joint IBM and Ricoh venture claimed that the development was a first for high speed colour digital printing, which has been hampered up until now by the performance of ICC colour profiles.

Clive Stringer, production sales manager at Infoprint for the UK, Nordics and South Africa, said: “Colour management traditionally uses a two-step process to convert colours between the source and destination ICC profiles via an intermediary Profile Connection Space. These two-step processes result in performance challenge when printing at higher speeds.”

According to Infoprint, its implementation of CMOCA, which adds AFP Colour Management Resources to industry ICC colour profiles, is the first of its kind and means that colour management can take place in a single step, ensuring accurate rendering at speed.

Stringer said: “Thanks to its AFP heritage and research and development focus on advanced controller technology, InfoPrint is the first company to introduce a printer controller and associated printer driver software that support CMOCA.

“Page-level error recovery and data integrity are essential for variable data printing and TransPromo. The InfoPrint 5000’s AFP controller now brings these benefits to colour environments. However, the controller’s support for CMOCA is what really makes high speed colour managed digital printing a production reality.”