FOSTER CITY, California – EFI, a world leader in customer-focused digital printing innovation, today announced that it has established an agreement with Osaka, Japan-based Sharp Corp. to develop versatile, integrated Fiery digital front ends (DFEs) for high-quality production printing.
 
As a result of this new agreement, EFI will provide its Fiery® DFE with Sharp® Pro Series Digital Color Document Systems. These Fiery Driven™ production systems will make their worldwide debut September 8-12 in Chicago at North America’s largest printing trade show, Print 13, in the EFI booth, #2602.
 
The Sharp® MX-6500N and MX-7500N Pro Series products are the first in the industry to offer full control of EFI’s Fiery Command WorkStation® job management interface right from the print engine operation panel. Sharp’s unique, 15.4-inch, high-resolution touch screen display serves as the primary operation panel for the Pro Series, giving operators convenient access to the Command WorkStation interface.
 
“This integration combines Sharp’s unique feature set with EFI’s high-performance Fiery technology for a complete solution to fulfill the demands of today’s print professionals,” said Mike Marusic, senior vice president, Marketing and Business Solutions Group, Sharp Imaging andInformation Company of America.
 
“We are excited about the alliance with Sharp in the development of
innovative new products in the production space,” said John Henze, vice president, Fiery marketing, EFI. “We have worked closely with Sharp to create the ultimate integrated printing platform for on-demand print environments that need precision job management.”
 
Unmatched versatility with Fiery’s powerful, flexible foundation
Sharp’s flagship Pro Series consists of two models, the MX-6500N and the MX-7500N, offering the Fiery Server MX-PE10 running the latest Fiery FS100 Pro system software. Designed for busy in-plant and on-demand production environments, these new models’ Fiery servers provide a powerful and flexible platform for managing environments with distributed operations, demanding turnaround times and different operator skill levels. The printers – which offer edge-to-edge printing for professional, full-bleed work and an exclusive, triple air-feed paper handling option supporting a wide range of media – help businesses produce more jobs in-house and improve profitability.
 
This new EFI/Sharp integration lets operators easily manage and prepare jobs at the press and virtually eliminates the need for multiple workstations for job management. The operation panel integrates a tactile keyboard with a touchpad-pointing device for PC-like operation.

The display itself has the look and feel of a large tablet with flick, tap and swipe operation. With this touch-screen operation, users can drag and drop print jobs, select print attributes and perform other actions. The tactile keyboard and touchpad offer more precise control over advanced workflow tools such as Fiery Image Enhance Visual Editor, Fiery Impose or EFI’s new Fiery JobMaster PDF-based job-preparation software.
 
Fiery Ticker, accessed directly from the display, gives operators control to set alerts for other operators for unattended printing and allows them to see warnings about the engine, including alerts to load media, when away from the engine.
 
The Fiery Server MX-PE10 includes Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE) support for PDF preferred printing environments. Plus, the DFE supports industry color, variable-data print and JDF standards and seamlessly integrates with EFI web-to-print and MIS solutions, third-party prepress solutions and other existing environments.
 
The new Sharp Pro Series MX-6500N and MX-7500N Digital Color Document Systems will be available from Sharp in September 2013.