Besides the user group meeting, the Brisque will be exhibited at Scitex World in Cannes, France, and at Seybold San Francisco. RIPs in perspective To put Brisque into context, it needs to be compared to other RIP implementations in the market. Harlequin has both advantages and disadvantages in comparison with other RIP architectures in the market. However, Harlequin has provided full multitasking and multiprocessing for some time and is ahead of the Brisque in these areas. It is also available under Unix and NT and is more cross-platform oriented than the Brisque.
Harlequin also supports a PCI card screening accelerator for higher performance.
There currently are no trapping or editing applications associated with this, but the RIP supports late binding OPI and HyWay has been working with trapping suppliers on incorporating this feature. Unlike the Brisque, both Harlequin and HyWay Ferranti support multiple types of output devices. Compared to other implementations of Adobe RIPs, it is difficult to provide an exact assessment since most other Adobe licensees have yet to announce how they will use of the new facilities in the coming CPSI release. Cascade Systems has announced its Orion RIP, which runs under NT or Solaris. It will have a good workflow control system linked into it, plus a connection to Cascade's DataFlow workflow management package.