“This is most significant upgrade since we first launched XMF,” said Fujifilm Europe business strategy manager John Davies.
XMF 6.1 includes Adobe PDF Print Engine 3 (APPE3) and is the first workflow to fully incorporate Adobe’s Mercury RIP Architecture. While XMF 5.5 first introduced elements of Mercury last year, because it was based on APPE 2.6 it had limited access to Mercury's capabilities.
“The combination of these technologies [APPE3 and Mercury] brings with it some significant advancements in variable data handling and printing. XMF was always intended to be a cross-media workflow, it started life as a CTP workflow but we knew its future would be digital and we’re seeing the realisation of what we did in the beginning by bringing in the latest Adobe technology,” said Davies.
He highlighted Mercury’s intelligent caching of elements that are used more than five times in a job, the ability to handle parallel ripping of multiple jobs, and the option to pause a job or jobs to prioritise others as some of its key XMF benefits. All key requirements for Fuji's next generation of B2 inkjet press, the Jet Press 720S, which now features variable data printing.
“We’ve now reached the point where there is virtually no limit to the abilities of the workflow, you can continually expand its processing capabilities of the workflow, it’s just down to the hardware that you run it on,” said Davies.
He said that the latest incarnation of XMF can now process jobs anywhere from two to 10 times faster that the earlier version.
As well as operating a dynamic multi-RIP environment, v6.1 also features full PDF-VT, as well as PDF and PPML, support and now has the ability prioritise certain customers’ jobs in the XMF queue without having to cancel and restart other jobs. It also offers support for server virtualisation, meaning that instead of having racks of servers users can now utilise use fewer, more powerful servers and run virtual servers in the background to reduce hardware maintenance costs and back-up requirements.
The first installations of XMF 6.1 are starting this month and a full roll-out is slated for early next year.
As well as a new version of the XMF workflow, Fuji has also launched release 10 of its online submission and approval system, XMF Remote.
Remote R10 is now based in HTML5 instead of Java to boost its security features and browser compatibility, as well as its tablet functionality.
New features also include XMF Remote Express, to enable one-off customers to simply be sent a link to upload and approve jobs, rather than the printer having to create an XMF user account for adhoc users.
XMF Remote R10 is being rolled out now and full shipping will begin next year.
