EFI CEO, Guy Gecht (left), seals the deal with Landa chairman and CEO, Benny Landa
EFI and Landa Corporation are set to work together to develop a digital front end (DFE) as part of Landa’s end-to-end nanographic printing solution.
Landa’s new DFE will employ EFI’s Fiery technology. With this, the DFE will offer new functionality for sheetfed and webfed nanographic printing presses in the commercial, folding carton, point-of-sale, publishing and flexible packaging markets.
The new DFE will stream jobs at full printing speed for 4-8 colour printing and will enable press operators to perform last minute job changes on the press, proof jobs and print rush jobs on-the-fly. It will also collect production feedback from the presses and support closed-loop colour control and inspection. The DFE will support all job dynamics including static, VDP (Variable Data Printing) and EPID (Every Page Is Different) printing.
Offering a breakthrough for cost-effectively printing short-to-medium job lengths, up to five times faster than existing digital printing presses, Landa’s presses create demanding technical challenges for processing job data. EFI, as a developer of colour DFE and digital print workflow technology, is positioned to deliver the technology needed to meet Landa’s colour management, job workflow and integrated MIS demands.
Guy Gecht, EFI’s CEO, announced the partnership together with Landa chairman and CEO, Benny Landa, to an audience of 1,000 EFI customers during the opening session of Connect, EFI’s annual users conference in Las Vegas.
‘Benny Landa is a legend in our industry, and we are excited to work with his company as its exclusive DFE technology provider,’ said Mr Gecht. ‘Landa nanographic printing presses have potential to accelerate the migration of mainstream commercial printing and packaging to digital printing. The Landa DFE provides a proven, ultra-high-speed and well integrated front end platform that customers will require.’
‘Our nanographic printing process enables us to offer offset-quality digital printing and a combination of format size and throughput speeds unprecedented in the graphic arts industry,’ said Mr Landa. ‘Reaching this remarkable and exciting goal requires partnering with best-in-class providers. That is the reason we chose Fiery technology and EFI as our development partner – to deliver the highest quality ultra-high-speed front-end platform to match the quality and performance of our Nanographic printing presses.’
Landa selected EFI because of its experience in high-speed digital systems and colour and print management. Landa customers can use the new DFE to create an end-to-end solution that naturally fits into their printing operation, whether full offset, all-digital or hybrid offset/digital.
The nanographic printing presses can be installed next to offset presses and use the same substrates. With the new DFE, the presses can integrate into a printer’s existing pre-press, production, business management workflow and finishing equipment. The DFE will also ensure consistency, accuracy and compliance to leading colour standards. It will enable high-speed, variable-data printing on any off-the-shelf B1 format substrate.
As with current Fiery platforms, the new DFE will integrate with EFI’s MIS/ERP systems, as well as with leading third-party prepress and workflow platforms, for streamlined job management and processing.
Fiery is the first and only DFE platform that carries a 100% perfect pass rating from industry organisation VIGC’s PDF RIP Audit. The Fiery DFE technology EFI is developing for Landa will use scalable, robust systems offering the processing power needed to drive large volumes of offset-quality digital images, including personalised and variable-data content.
The new Landa DFE will enter beta testing as part of the beta installations of the B1 format Landa S10 presses slated for Q4 of this year.
