Foster City, Calif. -- EFI, the world leader in customer-focused digital printing innovation, today launched a significantly enhanced version of EFI MicroPress, its scalable production workflow solution, with easier to use document management tools, a simplified user interface, and enhanced make-ready features to produce complex documents for fast turn-around. The industry-leading EFI MicroPress helps mid-to-high volume digital print environments maximize their current equipment investment by providing a high-performance document production system that streamlines prepress work, automates manual processes, and optimizes engine speed to efficiently produce color and black and white documents.

EFI MicroPress version 8.0 supports the latest industry standard file formats, and is the first EFI RIP with the power to natively process PostScript, PDF and XPS, resulting in faster, more accurate throughput. EFI MicroPress takes advantage of powerful hardware solutions to support 64-bit functionality, providing production print environments with the fastest, most capable late-stage editing solution available, allowing the highest level of flexibility before final production. EFI MicroPress is scalable to manage up to 12 digital print engines, providing a seamless growth path to support expanding future production workflow demands.

"In today's competitive landscape, made even tougher in these difficult economic times, businesses face the constant challenge of producing high volumes of documents with complex requirements in a short time. The significant enhancements in EFI MicroPress, specifically in make-ready features and color management, were designed to boost productivity and greatly speed production," said John Henze, vice president of marketing, Fiery Division, EFI. "EFI has been listening to our customers' needs and invested substantial development efforts in this new version to ensure the best possible workflow solution for our production printing users."

Significant 8.0 Enhancements

EFI MicroPress' TrueEdit make-ready module dramatically streamlines workflow and increases productivity by automating manual processes such as hand collating, tab inserting, document renumbering and booklet creation, enabling the set-up of even the most complex jobs in just a few clicks. With version 8.0, TrueEdit now supports more tab options, including bleed edge tabs, tabs with images, background color and 2-lines. Scanning support has been enhanced, simplifying the inserting or replacing of scanned pages in an existing document. TrueEdit has also improved its UI with a new page tree interface, making it easier for the user to quickly change paper type. Lastly, the new Center Page feature enables auto rotate and auto centering of pages, eliminating the need for additional software or extra steps to center a page.

The enhanced OCR support in EFI MicroPress enables the user to choose between different OCR modes, and to have OCR of any region of the page, including tabs. These flexible features are ideal in a fast-paced production environment.

EFI MicroPress 8.0 delivers expanded color features, including support for PANTONE Goe spot colors and four new color set-ups. PANTONE Goe is an entirely new color system from Pantone, intended to complement the world standard PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM by offering more colors (2,058 in total), a chromatic arrangement and reproduction efficiencies to meet today's needs. Now, there is seamless integration of PANTONE colors into the EFI MicroPress color workflow, creating accurate colors through minimal user interaction.

In addition to PANTONE Goe support, EFI MicroPress can now support four new color set-ups in the TrueColor color management module. The four options are MicroPress color, which matches EFI Fiery color for connections using a Fiery; SWOP, intended for color experts who want to control color independent of MicroPress; Office Graphics, intended for business graphics and office documents; and Photographic, for use with photo applications. These new options enable higher color matching and streamline the production process by ensuring the correct color more quickly.

EFI MicroPress also offers optional direct integration from Digital StoreFront, EFI's award-winning web-to-print platform, to completely automate the process of job submission over the Internet, job management and production.

EFI MicroPress 8.0 is available now through EFI and its authorized OEM partners. For more information, please visit www.efi.com or contact 800-875-7117.