In buoyant mood, after the success of its recent market flotation (CI No 1,990), San Bruno, California-based software company Electronics for Imaging Inc has announced its new FieryLite colour server; a series of upcoming enhancements for Fiery servers and version 1.01 of its Cachet colour editor; and a joint marketing deal with Canon Europe, amongst others. The new products tackle the problems of cheap, short-run printing, user-friendly colour matching techniques and colour portability between devices, all of which the company believes are slowing down the (inevitable) widespread use of colour in desktop printing. The FieryLite is an Adobe PostScript server that, when linked to a digital colour photocopier, will turn it into a full-colour PostScript printer. It is a low-cost, entry-level but upgradable – version of the company’s flagship product, the Fiery PostScript Colour Server. It is a new departure in several ways. For a start, it is the first in what will become a new family of Fiery servers – a Unix version with remote print queuing management facilities is promised for November 1993.
Digital half-tone printer
It is nearly half the price of the Fiery, which is aimed at the high to mid range of the market, and addresses users in corporate design and graphics departments, service bureaux, publishing departments needing speedy, high quality composite proofs, and new colour printer users. It is a digital half tone printer, delivering 400 by 400 dots-per-inch resolution at less than 30 pence per page, at speeds of up to five to seven pages in colour and 10 to 30 black and white pages per minute. It produces pages from PostScript and TIFF files created on either Apple Mac or MS-DOS personal computers and can be connected to Ethernet or LocalTalk networks. It is available this month for the following copiers: the Agfa XC305 (Europe only), the Canon CLC 300 and 500, the Kodak ColorEdge 1525 and 1550 and Xerox 5775 digital colour copier-printer. It costs ?14,500. Also available this month is version 1.01 of Electronics For Imaging’s Cachet colour correction program. This enables users to adjust the on-screen colours of images to that of a proven reference image, which can in turn be printed with known results. The main enhancements are support for the CMYK and TIFF print file formats and automatic Metric Colour Tag specification enabling users to define precisely the meaning of colour in their files. The shadow areas of printed images are also better defined under the new system. Cachet is currrently listed at $600; upgrades will be available free. A reseller programme has been launched in the US to help boost Cachet sales. Late this month, meantime, will see enhancements for the current 125i version of the Fiery server. They include support for a Canon 35mm film scanner; Windows 3.1 downloader and driver – the system was exclusively Mac-based before; and System Software 1.1 upgrades with upgraded downloader and faster scanning – the present System 1.1 package will be phased out upgrades available for current users. No prices are available as yet. Promised by the end of the year is the Fiery Print Calibrator that optimises the colour output from the Canon CLC 300 and 500, Kodak Colour Edge 1525 and 1550, Xerox 5775 and Agfa XC305. It interfaces with EFIColor colour management system profiles and compensates for any drift from this range, to ensure that the same colours can be produced by the same copiers day to day, and by different copiers in different locations. Minimum requirements are a Mac II running under System 6.05 with 13 colour monitor, 2Mb RAM, 8- or 24- video board and 2Mb hard disk. Price is unavailable. Products scheduled for the first quarter of 1993 are a new SCSI interface for faster printing; a 200Mb drive for storing print jobs and thousands of fonts; and 128Mb image memory with full resolution on A3. The addition of the TCP/IP networking protocol is also planned for the future. In addition to the expansion of its product lines, the company is also busily expanding its links with other organisations
. It has just completed an agreement with Canon Europa NV under which Canon’s European distribution network will market the Fiery via its European distribution network. EfiColor has also been integrated into Quark Inc’s QuarkXPress 3.2 program and the company’s Colour Rendering Dictionary is used in QMS Inc’s new ColorScript 210 and 230 colour print systems (CI No 2,005).
