Electronics For Imaging Inc. (EFI) and Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A. Inc. 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.

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 preflight tools, intelligent automation features and color management technologies that help ensure that print businesses produce documents correctly the first time, every time, at the lowest cost — correct job properties are selected by JobExpert, spot colors are optimized with Spot Pro, errors are caught with Fiery Preflight and finishing marks are visually added with Fiery Finishing Designer. With these features, customers can increase overall output volume and complete more jobs per shift while also giving printing operations the ability to capitalize on new growth opportunities.

The new solutions EFI and Konica Minolta are announcing include:

• EFI Fiery IC-319 and IC-318 v2 DFEs that will drive the Konica Minolta AccurioPress C14000/C12000 color 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 color presses
• EFI Fiery IC-317 and IC-419 v2 DFEs that will drive the Konica Minolta AccurioPress C4080/C4070/C4065 printers

"With these new EFI Fiery DFEs, we continue to extend the range of what AccurioPress users can achieve," said Dino Pagliarello, senior vice president of product management and planning, Konica Minolta. "We are pleased to be the first to incorporate these powerful new DFE solutions into our offering as they bring more competitive capabilities to Konica Minolta's digital printing portfolio."

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

Even faster processing time. The EFI Fiery DFEs are the fastest in the industry and just became even faster with FS500 Pro. With this new hardware/software platform, a graphics-intensive, 100-page photobook processes 36% faster than previous Fiery DFEs, enabling operators to turn jobs around faster, optimizing the capacity of the Konica Minolta presses and accepting additional jobs to boost revenue.

Less waste, more sellable prints. Customers can use the new preflight tools to easily find file errors, speeding time to print. External Fiery servers now come standard with Fiery Preflight, which automates 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 1 and 2, PDF 2.0 or GWG (Ghent Workgroup) with an easily understood visual report. Fiery JobExpert's intelligent automation technology saves customers valuable production minutes from job setup time by automatically choosing the right color and imaging settings. It enables less experienced staff to produce optimal output like pros. They also gain greater efficiency producing high-quality and personalized prints thanks to a native Adobe PDF Print Engine 5.5 workflow.

Accurate brand colors and real-time color adjustments. The new version of Fiery Spot Pro makes it faster to prepare media for print by optimizing all spot colors at once for the most accurate reproduction of brand colors with PANTONE Colors or customized libraries. Operators can minimize waste, reprints and customers rejecting jobs due to inconsistent or inaccurate color with the included EFI ColorGuard subscription — a cloud-based verification solution to track color 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. Customers can see a unique, live preview of their job content while setting the cut, crease and perforation marks. In this way, they can be confident that the finishing setup is accurate before sending the job to print, eliminating costly bindery waste.

"The Fiery FS500 Pro new platform offers advanced speed, higher automation and more capability than other digital front ends," said John Henze, vice president of sales and marketing, EFI Fiery. "Intelligent automation solutions in these new EFI Fiery DFEs also save customers labor cost and time by minimizing the need for manual inspection of print jobs, improving automated color 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," Henze continued. "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 labor-constrained economy."

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