EFI Fiery is a Key Component of Digital Infrastructure
Poole Printing, founded in 1947, prides itself on its ability to consistently provide printing to its customers in the Raleigh, NC, area. When Mory Read acquired Poole Printing in 2015, one of the first things he did was update the company’s digital infrastructure. “To be honest,” Read says, “there was no digital infrastructure. My first purchase was an entry-level printer, and I quickly upgraded to larger Canon (Booth N1009) digital presses.”
Today, Poole Printing has three Canon sheetfed printers, an imagePRESS C8000VP, a Canon imagePRESS C9010VP, and a Canon imagePRESS C700, as well as a Ricoh (Booth N1928) Pro 8320S black-and-white printer. All printers have EFI (Booth C8107) Fiery digital front ends.
Read came from a facility where he had been responsible for purchasing digital printers, adding, “I chose Fiery servers back then, and I continue to do so. I like its simplicity and features. Fiery is more universal. So much easier to work with and to teach people how to use.
“And it works with multiple printer brands,” he continues. “That means I have more choices when looking to acquire a new digital printer, as well as better management of my existing platform. Fiery Command WorkStation lets me control all my printers regardless of brand. I think of Fiery like Adobe PDF — a PDF is a PDF, an industry standard. I consider Fiery to be an industry standard as well.”
Two key Fiery tools that have benefited Poole Printing include Fiery Impose and Fiery Compose. “We didn’t use these tools in the beginning,” says Read. “As an offset shop, our prepress department was able to create templates in Adobe InDesign that were imposed. But we found that was antiquated and too slow. So, the next Fiery server I purchased, I added Impose-Compose to speed up that process and not require resources from the prepress department. It made our prepress department more efficient since they didn’t have to stop what they were doing to impose digital files; that is now done by the digital press operator in just a few clicks. Considering that we need to impose 20 to 25 jobs per day on average, Impose gives us a significant time savings — as much as six hours per day .”
High-quality color
Poole Printing also uses Fiery Color Profiler Suite. “I have multiple printers from different manufacturers,” he says, “and the presses don’t print exactly the same. Using Color Profiler Suite enables me to profile each printer to match one another, so all the output looks the same.”
A key goal is to ensure consistent color across a wide variety of media and presses. Although Poole Printing is not G7 certified, Read’s team does use Color Profiler Suite to verify G7 compliance. This also helps ensure color consistency from machine to machine. This is especially important since one press may run more than the other, and consumables are at various stages in their life cycles, which can also affect color quality.
Planning for the future
“One improvement I am looking for,” Read says, “is implementing Fiery FreeForm Create to help us more efficiently produce variable data printing, since that is an increasingly important part of our offerings. We are currently using InDesign for variable data, and it creates very large files. With Fiery FreeForm Create, once you specify an image to be reused in a job, it only needs to be processed once, making file sizes much smaller and the printing process faster.”
In addition, Read is looking to implement eProductivity Software (Booth C8107) PrintSmith Vision as an MIS to replace several manual steps in the operation, and provide greater integration across the workflow. “I understand that there is a pretty significant level of integration between Fiery servers and PrintSmith Vision,” he says.
Read concludes, “I am really happy with my EFI Fiery solutions. They are very effective and easy to use, important for a small shop like ours. Being able to manage all of my printers from a single Command WorkStation interface, as well as the imposition efficiencies, have really made a difference in my business.”
- People:
- Mory Read