New EFI and Sharp Alliance Brings Fiery Digital Front End to Market for Sharp Pro Series

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FOSTER CITY, Calif., Sept. 6, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) – EFI™ (Nasdaq:EFII), 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 and Information 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.
For more information about EFI Fiery Driven products, visit www.efi.comor contact 800-875-7117.
About Sharp Electronics Corporation
Sharp Electronics Corporation is the U.S. subsidiary of Japan’s Sharp Corporation, a worldwide developer of one-of-a-kind home entertainment products, appliances, networked multifunctional office solutions, solar energy solutions, LED lighting and mobile communication and information tools.
About Sharp Imaging and Information Company of America
Sharp Imaging and Information Company of America, a division of Sharp Electronics Corporation, markets the advanced, color MX Pro Series document systems that help companies manage workflow efficiently and increase productivity. Sharp® document systems feature the Sharp OSA® development platform, which seamlessly integrates network applications to create a personalized MFP that can meet virtually any business need, and Scan2 technology, which scans two-sided documents in a single pass to enhance scanning reliability and preserve document integrity. To keep documents safe from unauthorized users, Sharp is a leader in the MFP industry in security by offering the most secure suite of MFP applications.
For more information about the complete line of Sharp workgroup document systems, contact Sharp Electronics Corporation, Sharp Plaza, Mahwah, N.J., 07495-1163. For online product information, visitwww.sharpusa.com/documents.


About EFI
EFI™ (www.efi.com) is a worldwide provider of products, technology and services leading the transformation of analog to digital imaging. Based in Silicon Valley, with offices around the globe, the company’s powerful integrated product portfolio includes digital front-end servers; superwide, wide-format, label and ceramic inkjet presses and inks; production workflow, web to print, and business automation software; and office, enterprise and mobile cloud solutions. These products allow users to produce, communicate and share information in an easy and effective way, and enable businesses to increase their profits, productivity, and efficiency.
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NOTE TO EDITORS: The EFI logo, Fiery and Command Workstation are registered trademarks of Electronics For Imaging, Inc. in the U.S. and/or certain other countries. EFI and Fiery Driven are trademarks of Electronics For Imaging, Inc. in the U.S. and/or certain other countries. All other terms and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners, and are hereby acknowledged.
Nothing herein should be construed as a warranty in addition to the express warranty statements provided with EFI products and services.
This news release contains forward-looking statements, that are statements other than statements of historical fact including words such as “anticipate”, “believe”, “estimate”, “expect”, “consider”, “plan” and similar, any statements related to strategies or objectives of management for future operations, products, development, performance, any statements of assumptions or underlying any of the foregoing and any statements in the future tense. Forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual or future results to differ materially. For further information regarding risks and uncertainties associated with EFI’s businesses, please refer to the risk factors section in the Company’s SEC filings, including, but not limited to, its annual report on Form 10-K and its quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. EFI undertakes no obligation to update information contained herein, including forward-looking statements.