Ipex – Birmingham, England – April 5th, 2006 – EFI, the world leader in digital controllers, superwide format printers and inks and print management solutions for commercial and enterprise printing and Screen, producers of Trueflownet and one of the world's largest suppliers of equipment to the printing industry, today announced their collaboration to help ensure customers' success in migrating to a hybrid offset/digital environment. Graphic arts professionals, commercial printers, and pre-press companies will benefit from the integration of the companies' solutions. The number of companies operating mixed offset/digital print facilities has grown considerably and there is a need for workflows that help printers meet their customers' quality and deadline demands regardless of output. Screen's expertise in prepress workflow including certified PDF file submission, intelligent RGB color management and flexible imposition technologies, coupled with EFI's industry-leading solutions, makes it easy for Screen to offer these companies a highly-effective multi-functional workflow. There are more than 14 million users of Fiery controllers in the world, and more than 8500 businesses worldwide utilizing EFI's Print MIS Solutions to provide the foundation for their management processes. Via EFI's JDF Connector, EFI's Fiery and Print MIS Solutions integrate with Trueflownet. This collaboration enables Trueflownet users to deliver a more accurate, more efficient production workflow – from capturing the designer's original design intent to real-time estimating, accounting and billing, to producing brilliant digital output. “EFI Fiery is the industry-leading front end for many high quality digital printers, including Xerox, Canon, Ricoh, Océ and Konica Minolta,” says Anko Nakamura, Screen WF product manager, worldwide marketing department. “With our collaboration with EFI, Trueflownet customers can now automate production all the way from remote online file submission direct to digital proofing, platemaking, color-managed PDF generation and digital printing all in one smooth process. Mixed digital and litho environments are becoming the norm so it makes perfect sense to have one seamless workflow rather than two operations running in parallel.” “With the EFI/Screen collaboration, Trueflownet customers will be able to integrate Fiery-driven digital devices into their native pre-press workflow to output proofs and short-run on-demand print production,” added Kathy Wilson, EFI director of server product marketing and strategy. “The millions who depend on Fiery technology for precision color, consistent high quality digital output and workflow innovation will be able to more readily deploy the powerful print production tools found within Trueflownet.” Results of the collaboration will be presented by EFI (Stand D20 in Hall 9) and Screen Stand B40 in Hall 6) at IPEX this week.