Electronics For Imaging, Inc. creates innovative products to address customers’ toughest challenges in print production, and four of those advanced products earned honors in one of the nation’s top print technology competitions, the Product of the Year Awards from industry association SGIA.
Award judges recognized two EFI VUTEk LED inkjet printers for their quality results printing a test target image. EFI Fiery workflow and color management technologies also received Product of the Year honors for their ability to drive higher automation and print quality.
SGIA will present its awards during the upcoming Printing United tradeshow, Oct. 23-25 at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas, where EFI is showcasing many of its most-advanced display graphics and digital print technologies in booth 8233.
The EFI VUTEk 5r+ won the Product of the Year in the roll-to-roll UV printer, 80+ inches, category. The high-end, 198-inch wide roll-to-roll LED printer is the most technically advanced offering, with the highest rated speed/quality ratio, in its class. It offers high-quality imaging with 7-picoliter UltraDrop Technology and true resolution up to 1,200 dpi, with print speeds up to 5,160 square feet per hour. The roll-to-roll printer platform, which is also available in a 138-inch-wide VUTEk 3r+ model EFI is showing at Printing United, offers a host of productivity-enhancing options.
This VUTEk 5r+ is having a significant impact with customers for its ability to produce high volumes of high-quality roll-to-roll graphics. One user, David Clevenger, CEO of Kennesaw, Georgia-based Parallax Digital, said of the printer, “I am impressed with the quality. I have been involved with UV ink for 20 years in digital printing and there has been a big evolution in the technology that you can see with the UV-LED imaging on the VUTEk 5r+.”
The VUTEk 32h, EFI’s newest superwide-format hybrid printer, is the SGIA Product of the Year in the UV hybrid $100,000 to $500,000 category. This versatile, 126-inch wide LED printer is an ideal solution for customers moving into superwide production graphics printing with premium-quality, 7 picoliter UltraDrop Technology, eight colors plus white and multilayer printing, and an included EFI Fiery proServer Premium digital front end.
EFI Fiery JobFlow software has earned the 2019 SGIA Product of the Year in the workflow/MIS/CRM category for its ability to streamline and automate our customers’ production processes. The latest version of Fiery JobFlow, which EFI is featuring at Printing United, does more than ever before to help users prepare jobs for printing quickly and easily. Users can achieve consistent results with intelligent workflows that automate job processing and help them better manage user tasks and processes in job entry, impositioning, routing, preflighting and more using EFI technologies and advanced scripting for third-party application connectivity.
Fiery JobFlow user Dean Glasser, owner of three Australian Kwik Kopy franchises in Sydney, saves significant time with the software. “If a store takes in 100 jobs a week, there’s no question that EFI Fiery JobFlow has dropped the time to produce those from a week to about three days,” he said.
EFI ColorGuard – a brand-new product premiering at Printing United – garnered Product of the Year honors in the software-color enhancement category. It is a cloud-based solution for print production managers that standardizes the verification process to produce consistent, accurate color on Fiery Driven digital printers. Customers can use ColorGuard to ensure print systems are operating at their full color quality potential, with tools to monitor and receive color verification data in real-time.
“EFI’s technical innovations stem from an important, central concept – paying close, constant and careful attention to our customers’ needs,” said Ken Hanulec, worldwide vice president of corporate marketing, EFI.
“The four EFI products honored in this year’s SGIA Product of the Year Awards reflect our dedication to continue advancing print service providers’ success.”
