Konica Minolta First to Launch Presses with EFI Fiery FS500 Pro Software and New Hardware

In today’s fast-paced business environment, customers are faced with demands for shorter runs and competitive pricing. These new, higher-productivity Fiery DFEs offer preflight tools, intelligent automation features and colour management technologies that help ensure that print businesses produce documents correctly the first time, every time, at the lowest cost – correct job properties are selected by JobExpert, spot colours are optimised with Spot Pro, errors are caught with Fiery Preflight, and finishing marks are visually added with Fiery Finishing Designer. With these features, customers can increase overall output volume and complete more jobs per shift while also giving printing operations the ability to capitalise on new growth opportunities. 

The new solutions EFI and Konica Minolta are announcing include:·        

• EFI Fiery IC-319 and IC-318 v2 DFEs that will drive the Konica Minolta AccurioPress C14000/C12000 colour production presses for the high-end production printing market·        
• EFI Fiery IC-319 and IC-318L v2 DFEs that will drive the Konica Minolta AccurioPress C7100/C7090 light-production colour presses
• EFI Fiery IC-317 and IC-419 v2 DFEs that will drive the Konica Minolta AccurioPress C4080/C4070 and AccurioPrint C4065 printers. 

“With these new EFI Fiery DFEs, we continue to extend the range of what AccurioPress users can achieve,” said Olaf Lorenz, General Manager DX Branding Division Konica Minolta, Inc. “We are pleased to be the first to bring these powerful new DFE solutions into our portfolio as they bring more competitive capabilities to Konica Minolta’s digital printing portfolio.” 

EFI Fiery FS500 Pro servers offer a higher value proposition

The new Fiery FS500 Pro server platform offers many benefits to print service providers operating Konica Minolta presses, including:

• Even faster processing time. The EFI Fiery DFEs are the fastest in the industry and just became even faster with FS500 Pro. With this new hardware/software platform, a graphics-intensive, 100-page photobook processes 36% faster than previous Fiery DFEs, enabling operators to turn jobs around faster, optimising the capacity of the Konica Minolta presses, and accepting additional jobs to boost revenue.
• Less waste, more sellable prints. Customers can use the new Preflight tools to easily find file errors, speeding time to print. External Fiery servers now come standard with Fiery Preflight, which automates basic preflight checks for problems such as missing spot colours or low-resolution images. For more advanced preflight checks, Fiery Preflight Pro* verifies file compliance with industry standards and specifications such as PDF/X, PDF/VT 1 and 2, PDF 2.0, or GWG (Ghent Workgroup) with an easily understood visual report. Fiery JobExpert’s intelligent automation technology saves customers valuable production minutes from job setup time by automatically choosing the right colour and imaging settings. It enables less experienced staff to produce optimal output like a pro. They also gain greater efficiency producing high-quality and personalised prints thanks to a native Adobe PDF Print Engine 5.5 workflow.
• Accurate brand colours and real-time colour adjustments. The new version of Fiery Spot Pro makes it faster to prepare media for print by optimising all spot colours at once for the most accurate reproduction of brand colours with PANTONE^® Colors or customised libraries. Operators can minimise waste, reprints, and customers rejecting jobs due to inconsistent or inaccurate colour with the included EFI ColorGuard™ subscription – a cloud-based verification solution to track colour quality.
• Finished products completed with ease. The Fiery Finishing Designer is a fully visual interface included with Fiery Command WorkStation^® that simplifies creating and editing finishing definitions for the Konica Minolta TU-510 Inline Trimmer Unit. Customers can see a unique, live preview of their job content while setting the cut, crease, and perforation marks. In this way, they can be confident that the finishing setup is accurate before sending the job to print, eliminating costly bindery waste. “The Fiery FS500 Pro new platform offers advanced speed, higher automation and more capability than other digital front ends,” said John Henze, vice president of sales and marketing, EFI Fiery. “Intelligent automation solutions in these new EFI Fiery DFEs also save customers labour cost and time by minimising the need for manual inspection of print jobs, improving automated u management, and eliminating the need to print a test file to determine where to place finishing lines. 

“All this decreases cycle time and increases customers’ profit opportunities, while ensuring that they can delight their clients with printing that gets completed accurately and quickly. Reducing the time prepress and press operators must spend on these repetitive tasks also helps print business owners make staff more efficient, offsetting the difficulties they have hiring and retaining talent in today’s labour-constrained economy.” 

The new Fiery DFEs are available from Konica Minolta and authorised Konica Minolta resellers. For more information about EFI Fiery Driven™ products, visit www.efi.com.

About Konica Minolta Business Solutions Europe

Konica Minolta Business Solutions Europe GmbH, based in Langenhagen, Germany, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Konica Minolta Inc., Tokyo, Japan. With its unique expertise in imaging, data processing and data-based decision making, Konica Minolta creates relevant solutions for its customers – small and medium-sized businesses, large enterprises and public sector – and solves issues faced by society.

As a digital workplace solution provider, Konica Minolta helps its clients to identify and unlock the potential digitalisation holds and reach the next level in the digital maturity of their organisation by rethinking the workplace. In support of an ‚Intelligent connected workplace‘, Konica Minolta offers cloud, IT, managed print and video solution services for remote working, collaboration, workflow management and automation and security. The company’s success in driving transformation is also confirmed by IDC, since the ‚IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Print Transformation 2020 Vendor Assessment‘ stated that Konica Minolta is ‚recognised globally as a leader in print transformation‘. Konica Minolta has been a Microsoft Global Managed Partner since 2021.

Konica Minolta’s Igniting Print Possibilities offering helps printers, converters and brand owners maximise workflow automation to increase efficiency. The company delivers consultancy in all communication matters as well as top-of-the-line production, packaging as well as label printers. Its finishing devices create print products that stand out and create added value. Konica Minolta has established itself as the production printing market leader for more than a decade in Europe (InfoSource).

For an increasing number of organisations, success today is more than the narrow definition of financial prosperity – it also includes protecting the environment and having a positive impact on their workforce as well as the societies they are embedded in. With its commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Konica Minolta has pledged to consistently pursue its sustainability and social responsibility goals.

The company has been repeatedly recognised for its rich history of social contribution as well as for working towards achieving the SDGs throughout its business and supply chain. Konica Minolta is listed among "2021 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World" and received the highest level in EcoVadis Sustainability Ratings.

For its innovative service approach that complements their devices perfectly, Konica Minolta was awarded the prestigious ‚Buyers Lab PaceSetter Award for Serviceability and Support 2020/2021‘ from Keypoint Intelligence.

Konica Minolta Business Solutions Europe is represented by subsidiaries and distributors in more than 80 countries in Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East and Africa. With approximately 9,000 employees (as of April 2021), Konica Minolta Europe earned net sales of over 1.9 billion in financial year 2020/2021.

For more information, please visit https://www.konicaminolta.eu/… and follow Konica Minolta on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram.

* Fiery Preflight Pro is part of the Fiery Graphic Arts Pro Package; standard for IC-319 and optional for IC-318, IC-318L, and IC-317.