Boston, MA, Booth #647, March 4, 2007 : InfoPrint Solutions Company, a joint venture between IBM and Ricoh, announces that its InfoPrint 5000 full-color continuous forms printing system is now shipping with Advanced Function Printing (AFP) support, providing AFP monochrome users all the benefits of AFP for their full color applications and making TransPromo a realistic proposition for businesses that print transaction documents.

Companies using AFP for their monochrome transactional documents can now seamlessly add the InfoPrint 5000 to their environment to implement full color TransPromo applications with relevant promotional and marketing messages to increase the value of the document.

The InfoPrint 5000 fills the gap between offerings with very high quality but low speed and high cost; and alternatives with lower quality but very high speed. InfoPrint 5000 is positioned as a best-of-breed offering in this mid-range area. It enables customers including transactional printers, service bureaus, direct mailers, and some book printers to efficiently print high volumes of variable data documents in full color, with the security, controls and high performance of the AFP output environment.

"InfoPrint 5000 with full color AFP support is a leadership, proven color inkjet technology already being used by several customers around the world for production, and providing a new competitive value point for the mid-range segment of the market. Our new AFP support is just one of many enhancements in the pipeline for the InfoPrint 5000, in line with our history of extending our toner-based production platform" said George Promis, VP Color Solutions and Technology Alliances. "AFP is a published industry standard which has now been enabled for full color printing of variable data at very high speeds with complete integrity. This latest InfoPrint 5000 enhancement further supports our leadership position in helping our customers produce relevant variable color data on important client-facing documents."

The new InfoPrint 5000 models deliver the AFP benefits of page-level error recovery and data integrity critical for variable data printing in conjunction with the existing system benefits of speed, quality, reliability, and ease-of-use. These new models also offer native support for applications that utilize PostScript and PDF datastreams, and Encapsulated PostScript and PDF objects embedded in AFP/IPDS datastreams. The system incorporates other industry formats – including EPS, PDF, TIFF, GIF, JPEG, XML, XSL, PostScript, PCL and PPML – to cover the entire range of text, image, graphics, process color and monochrome printing. AFP's dynamic architecture is designed to maximize flexibility, such as enabling color jobs to be printed on either InfoPrint 5000 or InfoPrint 4100, without re-ripping the job.

Using InfoPrint ProcessDirector for high-speed production print environments, it can provide a customizable process management system that automates many tasks previously handled manually. Alternatively, it can also be driven using InfoPrint Manager and PSF 4.2.0 for Z/OS. All of these products are designed to improve the management of output environments, which can help clients reduce costs, improve quality, and seamlessly respond to changes in their processes.

The InfoPrint 5000 utilizes innovative piezo-electric, drop-on-demand inkjet technology with high quality water-based inks that are resistant to fading and smearing, even on commonly used digital papers.

The new AFP InfoPrint 5000 models are available in simplex or tandem duplex configurations. The system can print at speeds up to 209.9 feet per minute (64 meters per minute) or 916 full-color, two-up duplex letter-size ipm (or 862 full-color two-up duplex A4-size ipm)¹. The system has a 20.4-inch web with up to 19.96-inch print width, and is designed to deliver excellent print quality at 720 x 360 dots per inch (dpi) resolution.

In addition to the new AFP full color support, the InfoPrint 5000 solution has also been enhanced with the ability to provide additional end-to-end services to support color implementation, through the new InfoPrint global TransPromo Consulting Practice, which offers professional services to achieve an effective and efficient TransPromo environment.