Océ high volume solutions fully support new IS/3 standard, giving maximum efficiency and interoperability

Venlo, The Netherlands, – Océ, an international leader in digital document management and delivery and one of the leading members of the AFP Consortium (AFPC) today endorsed the announcement of a new version of the Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) industry standard. The AFPC was established to develop, define and promote the AFP architecture as the best-in-class data stream for high volume variable-data printing with seamless interoperability of AFP products from the various AFPC members. A common level of functionality and interoperability of systems was one of the main reasons why the new AFP IS/3 standard has been introduced. The new IS/3 interchange set delivers cost-efficiency savings and provides interoperability in multi-vendor environments. It is implemented and fully supported by a full-color continuous feed inkjet portfolio that leads the market and includes the Océ JetStream family and the Océ ColorStream 3500, the latest Océ PRISMAproduction Server – Océ's state-of-the-art output- and workflow management system – as well as select Canon imagePRESS and imageRUNNER ADVANCE systems. Customers can be sure that print jobs generated with PRISMAproduction Server are fully IS/3 compliant and are correctly presented or printed on all IS/3 compliant systems.

Most transaction documents are sensitive or critical communications associated with financial, insurance, retail, utilities and healthcare institutions worldwide using AFP amounting to billions of mail pieces produced every month. The new IS/3 enhances the productivity in today's complex production printing environments, while providing support for the latest fonts, images and graphics.

"The definition of IS/3 is an important announcement for our numerous AFP customers and the digital printing industry as a whole," observes Crit Driessen, Vice President, Marketing and Strategy, Océ Production Printing. "The IS/3 standard ensures efficient and cross-vendor interoperability for many of our customers who are users of AFP. The optimized integration of and communication between large numbers of variable-data print jobs among large numbers of printers and servers will ensure them a future proof long-term investment in AFP."

The IS/3 standard features comprehensive color support, including process and spot colors, ICC-based color management, and industry-standard image file formats such as TIFF and JPEG. IS/3 also incorporates support for industry-standard OpenType fonts and Unicode-based data encoding. Furthermore the enhanced interoperability of IS/3-compliant components allows customers to significantly cut the cost and time involved in configuring, installing and operating multi-vendor AFP systems.

Océ has already supported the majority of functions within IS/3 in its full color continuous feed portfolio since mid-2010. The main new functions in the IS/3 standard now available in the Océ portfolio include AFPC JPEG, a format covering regular RGB-based JPEGS and Adobe CMYK JPEG formats, and AFPC TIFF, an extended TIFF set that offers improved transparency functions to simplify the integration of complexly shaped images without white spaces.