Prepress
EFI Fiery Platform Drives New Ricoh Production Printer; Top Speed, Quality and Powerful VDP Increase Customers ROI
Monday 02. June 2008 - New Fiery for Ricoh Pro C900 among EFI Advanced Workstream Solutions Showcased at drupa
Ricoh and EFI (Nasdaq: EFI), the world leader in customer-focused digital printing innovation, today announced the newest progress in the companies strategic alliance to help customers succeed in the high-end Print-on-Demand market. The EFI Fiery platform optimizes the new 90 ppm (pages per minute) Ricoh Pro C900 with top speed, quality, and powerful VDP, and increases return on equipment investment for Ricoh customers in print for pay, reprographic and graphic arts production environments, as well as service bureaus and direct mail companies. At drupa (May 29 – June 11, 2008) Ricoh Booth A60 in Hall 9, Ricoh will demonstrate the new Fiery among several solutions from the EFI Advanced Workstream Solutions portfolio for Ricoh customers in the professional print market, including the MicroPress raster-based colour and black and white workflow solution and Digital StoreFront web-to-print platform. In a first-time demonstration, Ricoh will showcase integration of the newest version of EFI Advanced Workstream Solution Fiery Central, production workflow, management and sophisticated make-ready solution.
“This is the first time Ricoh is exhibiting at drupa, and our alliance with EFI is significant to the digital colour production print solutions well demonstrate, particularly the star of our show presence, the Fiery-driven Ricoh Pro C900,” says Simon Tapley, manager, Production Printing Solutions, Ricoh Europe. “Digital printing is leading the way in the colour production market because of its efficiency and short turnaround time. Working with EFI, leaders in high-end digital print technology innovation, enables us to address our production-class customers needs and deliver the professional quality and heavy duty performance that leads to greater profitability.”
“Drupa attendees visiting the Ricoh booth will be among the first to see the greatest ingenuity from EFI and Ricoh come together specifically to help customers succeed in the professional digital print market,” said Judy Lin, general manager, Fiery Division, EFI. “The Fiery for the Ricoh Pro C900 and other solutions from the EFI Advanced Workstream Solutions Portfolio Ricoh will showcase at drupa deliver tremendous value. These EFI solutions increase return on equipment investment for Ricoh customers as they realize increased efficiency, perfect colour every time, and fast document turnaround, even for the most complex VDP work.”
EFI Fiery Platform for the Ricoh Pro C900
The Fiery platform enables Ricoh Pro C900 customers to compete more effectively and achieve the highest levels of efficiency in production printing environments, where engine utilization, speed, advanced colour management, and connectivity are critical to success and profitability.
The Fiery is fully compliant with PDF/X3, a specification for reliable prepress data interchange that enables designers to provide digital content files that can be printed predictably and correctly by the print provider. The Fiery passes the Altona Test Suite and Ghent Output Suite, making it an ideal proofing system for press simulation in the professional digital print environment.
The Fiery is an open, flexible solution addressing advanced requirements of Ricoh Pro C900 customers, offering customers powerful standard features and the option of additional packages to customize their Fiery to address their specific needs. EFI Impose, a What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) document imposition solution, on-line, at-the-point-of-need instructions to make the most complex jobs easy to manage, advanced Fiery job management capabilities, and the Graphic Arts Package are bundled features. Options include Compose, EFIs visual document make-ready solution, the Fiery Graphic Arts Package, Premium Edition, a professional “toolkit” for colour accuracy and precision, and the award-winning EFI Color Profiler Suite profiling solution, a complete suite of integrated colour management tools to ensure total colour quality control in colour printing workflows for graphic arts professionals. The bundled features alone or in combination with the optional features optimize digital press performance and operational ease, boosting productivity and ROI for Ricoh Pro C900 customers.
The powerful Fiery-driven print server delivers new revenue stream opportunities such as high-value variable data printing (VDP). The Fiery readily passed the most current PPML (Personalized Print Markup Language) testing and earned PODi (Print on Demand Initiative)s newest interoperability certification. The certification ensures that Ricoh Pro C900 customers have the highest possible levels of throughput and productivity when printing personalized material on demand at high volume. EFI has forged partnerships with leading third-party personalization software providers and supports such VDP languages as PPML, Fiery FreeForm, and a host of legacy proprietary languages, ensuring that the Fiery platform readily integrates into existing workflows and delivers consistency regardless of whether the job is VDP or non-VDP.
Fiery supports the new colour specification, PANTONE Goe System enabling accurate spot colour reproduction and the ability to generate PANTONE libraries directly from the Fiery-driven Ricoh Pro C900. Optional Fiery connectivity with Rampage Workflow System enables high-volume prepress production across diverse plate setters, proofing systems and other output devices.
With the Fiery open platform and compliance with industry standards such JDF (Job Definition Format), PDF (Portable Document Format), and PPML, the Fiery seamlessly integrates into Ricoh customers’ overall print shop operations, including offset/digital hybrid environments and third-party graphic arts workflows, including CTP (Computer-to-Plate) environments.
The Fiery is a key component of fully integrated EFI Advanced Workstream Solutions, world-class products, services and support that drive customers success. These solutions integrate every aspect of a professional digital print business, from management to production, colour and output. The EFI Advanced Workstream Solutions featured at the drupa Ricoh booth include:
Fiery Central, EFIs production workflow, management and sophisticated make-ready solution. Readily enabling connection to multiple digital output devices, Fiery Central is a powerful yet flexible solution that leverages customers’ investment in Fiery-driven technology and familiarity with the Fiery workflow. Further, JDF connectivity enables a broadened range of integrated workflows. Fiery Central comes in three modular components to address customers’ specific needs and expand as their workflow requirements change.
Digital StoreFront (DSF), EFI’s web-to-print platform providing a digital on-ramp for customers to connect with their preferred print service provider. DSF eases print job specification and file handling for the customer while automating workflow for the print service provider. With DSF, print service providers can provide proactive job status via the Web and customers are given better visibility into the production process via online job tracking.
EFI MicroPress, which leverages the latest in platform and operating system technology to deliver productive colour and black and white digital prepress, powerful document make-ready and workflow management solutions for Ricoh digital output devices. The scalable MicroPress solutions accommodate present and future business needs, maximize work productivity, and achieve the highest print quality for Ricoh customers in critical production print environments.
Availability
EFI solutions designed for Ricoh customers are available directly from Ricoh Europe.