Ricoh’s newest colour production devices, the Pro C720 and C720s series have been released to the Australian market. The Pro C720/C720s are the latest in Ricoh’s ‘Pro’ series of digital devices, designed specially for the production environment.

The Ricoh Pro C720/720s have been specifically developed to fill market demand for affordable production grade colour devices.

After talking to various customer print rooms, Ricoh found that many were starting to increase capacity after the global financial crisis but were hesitant to make a big investment in equipment.

“Customers needed a machine that could fill their initial requirement and then grow with their business,” explained Ricoh Australia’s Product Group Manager of Production, Dave Gully. “The Ricoh Pro C720/C720s have true production credentials. With a speed of 72 pages per minute, regardless of stock weight, they also offer extensive inline finishing features including stapling, punching and front & back cover insertion.”

According to the Print Shop Supervisor, Richard Such, the challenge lay in colour production, most notably the full-colour posters as well as the interposing of full colour covers over their mono race books, which was causing a bottleneck.

Following implementation of the Ricoh Pro C900 at the Print Shop, and a seamless integration with the Greyhounds WA network operating environment, productivity gains were almost immediate. Ricoh product specialists provided on-site training and worked alongside Such and his team to develop accurate colour profiles that would deliver optimum colour accuracy on a range of specified media for their race book covers and posters.

From that point on, the Print Shop’s productivity soared. So much so, that within a matter of weeks one of the three team members was able to move to a different area of operations without any impact on productivity.

As Greyhounds WA were producing over 2500 A4 saddle stitched race books each week, creating an efficient workflow was paramount to the install. The Ricoh Pro C900’s integration with the Print Shop’s existing equipment, particularly the Ricoh Pro 1356EX, resulted in a fully-finished book being produced with very little operator intervention.

"Increasingly, digital print production is more economical – in time and money – than traditional offset printing," Such states. "And when it comes to quality, the advances have been so great that where I used to be able to tell easily the difference between offset and digital prints, with the Pro C900 and Pro 1356EX, I now need a magnifying glass.

[Bridgewater, NJ - June 30, 2010] - emFAST Inc., a pioneer in network fax messaging, is pleased to announce that certification of the FACSys Connector for Ricoh ESA-enabled MFPs has been extended to the entire MFP family running SDK/J versions 4.2, 5.08 and 7.03. Combined with a FACSys fax server, this feature-rich connector, accessible from the touch screens of these devices, enables users to transmit faxes and fully leverages the inherent print functions of a Ricoh MFP to print from the FACSys inbox. With the updated version, users can now choose between the authenticated full feature set of the original FACSys Connector or the new FACSys "QuickFax" feature.

As a member of the RiDP Premier Plus program, emFAST used Ricoh's Software Developer's Kit (SDK) to fully integrate Ricoh MFPs with its secure and intuitive fax server solution. Ricoh's sophisticated Embedded Software Architecture (ESA) platform allowed the emFAST development team to fully leverage the capabilities found in Ricoh's MFPs.

"Ricoh's Software Developer's Kit provided a fast and easy means to develop the client for this connector," said Hamsa Buvaraghan, Principal Software Engineer, emFAST Inc. "Our FACSys Connector continues to lead the way in leveraging the Ricoh ESA development platform to extend functionality and enhance the user experience of the Ricoh ESA-enabled MFP product line."

West Caldwell, NJ and Foster City, Calif. – May 26, 2010 – Ricoh Americas Corporation, a leading provider of digital office equipment and advanced document management solutions and services, and EFI™ (Nasdaq: EFII), a world leader in customer-focused digital printing innovation, today announced that Fiery® technology is powering Ricoh’s new Aficio® MP C6501SP/C7501SP digital imaging system. This pairing brings nearly one-and-a-half times faster performance than the previous generation, built-in production and publishing support with Fiery VUE, and many tools that guarantee color quality and increase productivity for high-volume corporate environments.

“This launch marks the latest in a long-standing collaboration with EFI, whose Fiery technology contributes to the efficiency and quality of several Ricoh systems across our portfolio,” said Shun Sato, senior vice president of marketing, Ricoh Americas Corporation. “Partnering with EFI supports Ricoh’s commitment to offer customers of all types and sizes a powerful MFP that enables them to produce professional-looking, color-rich documents in-house.”

“Our high-performance Fiery E-7200 controller together with the unique features of the Aficio MP C6501SP/C7501SP digital imaging system allow corporate users of all experience levels to easily produce documents from presentations to brochures, finished booklets, and everything in-between,” said John Henze, Fiery vice president of marketing, EFI. “Besides unmatched performance, Fiery technology is synonymous with intuitive workflows, easy to use job management features, and accurate color reproduction that meet the demanding needs of Ricoh customers every time they print.”

The Fiery controller is one of the first to support Fiery VUE, the desktop application that makes publishing of professional-looking finished documents fast and simple for all office workers. Fiery VUE allows users to interact with a document on-screen in 3D to sculpt and then preview exactly how the finished document will look when printed. This creates better looking documents, reduces waste and lowers overall cost.