EFI and Konica Minolta have announced a continuation of their long-term partnership with the release of five new EFI Fiery digital front ends (DFEs) based on the newest Fiery platform, Fiery FS500 Pro.

The new solutions that EFI and Konica Minolta are launching include:

• EFI Fiery IC-319 and IC-318 v2 DFEs that will drive the Konica Minolta AccurioPress C14000/C12000 colour production presses for the high-end production printing market
• EFI Fiery IC-319 and IC-318L v2 DFEs that will drive the Konica Minolta AccurioPress C7100/C7090 light-production colour presses
• EFI Fiery IC-317 and IC-419 v2 DFEs that will drive the Konica Minolta AccurioPress C4080/C4070 and AccurioPrint C4065 printers.

The companies said in today’s fast-paced business environment, customers are faced with demands for shorter runs and competitive pricing.

These new, higher-productivity Fiery DFEs offer pre-flight tools, intelligent automation features and colour management technologies that help ensure that print businesses produce documents correctly every time, at the lowest cost – correct job properties are selected by JobExpert, spot colours are optimised with Spot Pro, errors are caught with Fiery Preflight, and finishing marks are visually added with Fiery Finishing Designer.

With these features, the companies added that customers can increase overall output volume and complete more jobs per shift while also giving printing operations the ability to capitalise on new growth opportunities.

“With these new EFI Fiery DFEs, we continue to extend the range of what AccurioPress users can achieve,” Konica Minolta DX branding division general manager Olaf Lorenz said.

“We are pleased to be the first to bring these powerful new DFE solutions into our portfolio as they bring more competitive capabilities to Konica Minolta’s digital printing solutions.”

He added that the new Fiery FS500 Pro server platform offers many benefits to print service providers operating Konica Minolta presses, including:

Faster processing times: The EFI Fiery DFEs have become even faster with FS500 Pro. With this new hardware/software platform, a graphics-intensive, 100-page photobook processes 36 per cent faster than previous Fiery DFEs, enabling operators to turn jobs around faster, optimising the capacity of the Konica Minolta presses, and accepting additional jobs to boost revenue.

Less waste and more sellable prints: Customers can use the new Pre-flight tools to easily find file errors, speeding time to print. External Fiery servers now come standard with Fiery Preflight, which automates basic pre-flight checks for problems such as missing spot colours or low-resolution images.

For more advanced pre-flight checks, Fiery Pre-flight Pro verifies file compliance with industry standards and specifications such as PDF/X, PDF/VT 1 and 2, PDF 2.0, or GWG (Ghent Workgroup) with an easily understood visual report.

Fiery JobExpert’s intelligent automation technology automatically chooses the right colour and imaging settings. It enables staff to produce optimal output. They also gain greater efficiency producing high-quality and personalised prints thanks to a native Adobe PDF Print Engine 5.5 workflow.

Accurate brand colours and real-time colour adjustments: The new version of Fiery Spot Pro makes it faster to prepare media for print by optimising all spot colours at once for the most accurate reproduction of brand colours with Pantone Colors or customised libraries. Operators can minimise waste, reprints, and customers rejecting jobs due to inconsistent or inaccurate colour with the included EFI ColorGuard subscription – a cloud-based verification solution to track colour quality.

Finished products completed with ease: The Fiery Finishing Designer is a fully visual interface included with Fiery Command WorkStation that simplifies creating and editing finishing definitions for the Konica Minolta TU-510 Inline Trimmer Unit. Users can see a live preview of their job content while setting the cut, crease, and perforation marks.

“The Fiery FS500 Pro new platform offers advanced speed, higher automation and more capability than other digital front ends,” EFI Fiery vice-president of sales and marketing John Henze said.

“Intelligent automation solutions in these new EFI Fiery DFEs also save customers labour cost and time by minimising the need for manual inspection of print jobs, improving automated u management, and eliminating the need to print a test file to determine where to place finishing lines.

“All this decreases cycle time and increases customers’ profit opportunities, while ensuring that they can delight their clients with printing that gets completed accurately and quickly. Reducing the time prepress and press operators must spend on these repetitive tasks also helps print business owners make staff more efficient, offsetting the difficulties they have hiring and retaining talent in today’s labour-constrained economy.”

The new Fiery DFEs are available from Konica Minolta and authorised Konica Minolta resellers.

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