EFI Brings Smart Innovation to Production Print with New EFI Fiery Platform

The EFI Fiery FS500 Pro delivers advanced automation, colour, and job processing technology to meet the challenges in evolving print markets.

Electronics for Imaging, Inc. announced the new EFI™ Fiery® FS500 as the latest and most advanced step forward for the world’s leading digital front end (DFE) server solution for digital printing.

The Pro platform Fiery FS500 Pro will assist print providers in meeting the challenges of shorter runs, with faster turnaround times, using less experienced staff, with increased security standards and the need to reduce cost. In addition, the platform brings innovation to an already extensive line-up of new, state-of-the-art digital printers 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, colour 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.”

There are five key areas of innovation:

• Faster job processing. Print providers will benefit from a faster job processing time and up to 40 percent faster application launch time to produce more jobs per shift. In addition, with the new Fiery FS500 Pro hardware and software platform, a graphics-intensive, 100-page photo book processes 36 percent faster than 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. In addition, a new print time estimation feature helps print operations plan better and schedule production resources for a more profitable operation. Fiery JobExpert, which is now available for all Fiery servers, saves valuable production time from job setup by automatically choosing the right colour and imaging settings. This feature is an example of adding intelligence to the digital front end compared to OEM DFEs that need users to know a raft of settings to get jobs done correctly.

• More sellable print, less waste. Fiery FS500 Pro has more tools available to detect potential errors in files, reducing production time and waste. External FS500 Pro servers are standard with Fiery Preflight, which provides basic preflight checks for problems such as missing spot colours or low-resolution images. Fiery Preflight Pro verifies file compliance with industry standards and specifications for more advanced preflight checks, including 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. In addition, customers can produce higher-quality jobs and personalised prints with an Adobe PDF Print Engine 5.5 workflow, the default interpreter on external Fiery servers and an option on embedded servers.

• More accurate brand colours. A new Fiery TrueBrand solution for corporate users makes it easy to print brand colours from Microsoft Word or PowerPoint accurately. In production environments, the latest version makes it faster for print providers to get media ready to print by optimising all spot colours at once for the most accurate reproduction of brand colours.

• Advanced security. Fiery FS500 Pro provides new features for high security environments, ensuring compliance with customer security requirements and industry standards. As well as the latest security updates, the Fiery FS500 Pro servers include a security audit log that integrates into customer Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) solutions, which help detect and address security-related issues.

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

EFI will launch the Fiery FS500 Pro-based DFEs with new office and production printers and presses from many of the world’s leading manufacturers. It 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.