Company: Electronics For Imaging, Inc.

Website: www.efi.com

Technology Snapshot: Electronics For Imaging, Inc., has announced its newest, most advanced step forward for the world’s leading digital front end (DFE) server solution for digital printing—the new EFI Fiery FS500 Pro platform. Fiery FS500 Pro will help print providers meet the challenges of shorter runs, faster turnaround times, less experienced staff, increased security standards, and the need to reduce cost. The new Fiery DFE platform brings innovation to an extensive line-up of new, state-of-the-art digital printers coming for office, commercial, in-plant, packaging, and textile printing. 

“As the industry begins a recovery from the recent downturn, print businesses across all segments are looking to invest in solutions that enhance their productivity, reduce waste, and shorten cycle times,” said John Henze, vice president of sales and marketing, EFI Fiery. “That’s exactly what this brand-new Fiery platform brings, with advancements that take print businesses to new levels of production efficiency, color accuracy, and profit potential. We are excited to begin seeing our OEM partners roll out this new platform with the next generation of their digital printers and presses.”

The Fiery FS500 Pro platform features five key areas of innovation:

• Faster job processing. Print providers will benefit from faster job processing time and up to 40 percent faster application launch time to produce more jobs per shift. For example, with the new Fiery FS500 Pro hardware and software platform, a graphics-intensive, 100-page photobook processes 36 percent faster compared with previous Fiery platforms.
• Faster turnaround time for short runs. Advanced Fiery features speed up administration and production of print jobs in fast moving print shops. A new print time estimation feature helps print operations better plan and schedule production resources for a more profitable operation.
• Fiery JobExpert, now available for all Fiery servers, saves valuable production minutes from job setup time by automatically choosing the right color and imaging settings. This unique feature is an example of adding intelligence to the digital front end compared to OEM DFEs that require users to know a myriad of settings to get jobs done correctly.
• More sellable print, less waste. Fiery FS500 Pro has more tools available for detecting potential errors in files, reducing both production time and waste. External FS500 Pro servers now come standard with Fiery Preflight, which provides basic preflight checks for problems such as missing spot colors or low-resolution images. For more advanced preflight checks, Fiery Preflight Pro verifies file compliance with industry standards and specifications, such as PDF/X, PDF/VT, PDF 2.0, or GWG (Ghent Workgroup). The visual Preflight Pro Report makes it easy to find file errors, speeding time to print. Customers can produce higher-quality jobs and personalized prints with a native Adobe PDF Print Engine 5.5 workflow, the default interpreter on external Fiery servers and an option on embedded servers.
• More accurate brand colors. A new Fiery TrueBrand solution for corporate users makes it easy to ensure accurate printing of brand colors from Microsoft Word or PowerPoint. In production environments, the new version of Fiery Spot Pro makes it faster for print providers to get a media ready to print by optimizing all spot colors at once for the most accurate reproduction of brand colors.
• Advanced security. Fiery FS500 Pro provides new features for high security environments, ensuring compliance with customer security requirements and industry standards. In addition to the latest security updates, Fiery FS500 Pro servers include a security audit log that can integrate into customer Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions, which help to detect and proactively address security-related issues. 

FS500 Pro enables quick and easy onboarding to the EFI IQ suite of cloud applications that connect people, processes, and print devices to enable better, data-driven decisions for print businesses.

EFI will launch Fiery FS500 Pro-based DFEs with new office and production printers and presses from many of the world’s leading manufacturers. Fiery FS500 is also the basis for next-generation blade-server DFE systems developed for new ultra-high-speed, single-pass inkjet production solutions coming to market.