Canon U.S.A. Introduces Three New imagePROGRAF Large Format Printers

(Lake Success, NY) - Canon U.S.A., Inc., a leader in digital imaging and advanced office solutions, today answers the increasing demand for large format prints in the photographic, proofing and graphic arts market with the introduction of three new imagePROGRAF large format models - the 44-inch imagePROGRAF iPF8300, 24-inch imagePROGRAF iPF6350 and the iPF6300. Designed for precise, ultra high-quality print performance and increased productivity, each model features Canon's new, 12-Color LUCIA EX pigment ink set and advanced printing technologies specifically developed to produce prints with an enhanced color range and improved durability. The new imagePROGRAF models will be unveiled at the Wedding & Portrait Photographer International (WPPI) Convention at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, March 8-11, 2010.

"In just four short years, Canon has introduced more than 20 imagePROGRAF large format printers to the market with each new model raising the bar for outstanding, vibrant image quality and overall versatility," said Jim Rosetta, vice president and general manager, Imaging Systems Group, Canon U.S.A. "Coupled with our new LUCIA EX ink set and advanced media capabilities, the new imagePROGRAF models represent an ideal solution for the graphic, fine art, photography and proofing markets."

Enhanced Color Spectrum
With increasing consumer demand for professional and high-quality print jobs, high-end graphic and photographic studios continue to seek the capability to accurately produce vivid output of consumers' most demanding projects. To enhance its available color spectrum, the new imagePROGRAF models feature a revolutionary all-new 12-Color LUCIA EX pigment ink set increasing the achievable color gamut by approximately 20 percent from the previous imagePROGRAF iPFx100 series and enabling over 90 percent coverage of PANTONE ® (^*) colors to produce rich expression. Additionally, to better meet the needs of the professional print market, the new models feature a reinforced mechanical structure to enable precise ink placement for improved text and line accuracy, making these new devices a powerful proofing solution.

Exquisite Photographic Output
The introduction of the new LUCIA EX ink provides photographers with the ability to precisely achieve their desired results by producing more expressive and crisp blacks, smooth color gradations, and the capability to reproduce the finest details in the shadow areas of photographs. The new inks are also designed with an innovative polymer structure that results in greater scratch resistance and protection from color fading, while also reducing bronzing and metamerism ensuring durable, stable output.

Wilhelm Imaging Research (WIR), the world's leading independent image permanence testing laboratory, has been evaluating the new Canon LUCIA EX expanded-gamut, 12-color pigment inks. Henry Wilhelm, president of WIR commented, "A review of preliminary data from the still ongoing tests indicates that prints made with LUCIA EX pigment inks and select photo and fine art papers will achieve WIR Display Permanence Ratings in excess of 75 years for color images and well beyond 200 years for black-and-white images. In addition, LUCIA EX pigment inks exhibit excellent short-term color drift ("dry-down") behavior, which is critically important for color-managed workflows and in proofing applications. The new LUCIA EX inks also achieved WIR's highest rating for resistance to damage from atmospheric ozone, a particular concern in urban environments in situations where prints might be displayed unframed and exposed to ambient indoor air."

Simplified Workflows
Recognizing the expanding array of media options for large format printers and to further improve the versatility of these new imagePROGRAF models, Canon has developed a new Media Configuration Tool which allows customers to not only utilize genuine Canon-branded media, but provides the ability to add and make adjustments to paper settings to enhance the precision and quality of output achieved with third-party media. Upon release of the new printer, ICC profiles of popular media types from Intelicoat, Ilford, LexJet and Moab will be available for download on their respective corporate Web sites.

To expand print options and improve proofing capabilities, the iPF8300, iPF6350 and iPF6300 come bundled with a new Print Plug-In for Photoshop®, Digital Photo Professional and support for Adobe Color Management Module, enabling features such as Black Point Compensation. Through the Photoshop Plug-In, each new model allows 16-bit RGB images edited in Photoshop to be sent directly to the imagePROGRAF printers, preserving smooth and high gradation.

Brian Hampton, an award-winning nature photographer printing with a Canon imagePROGRAF for the first time stated, "The quality of the print is amazing. I was particularly impressed by the iPF8300's ability to reproduce shadow details in a way that exceeds anything I've seen previously on the market. It's quite a step above the competition." Hampton also noted the built-in workflow solutions and commented, "The ability to export out of Photoshop via the plug-in is outstanding. Many of its capabilities perform as well as an RIP program without the additional cost."

Maximize Productivity
In order to support high-volume printing and streamline workflows the Canon iPF8300 and iPF6350 come equipped with an 80 GB high-capacity hard disk drive (HDD) that allows for faster spooling of large files as well as the ability to reprint jobs directly from the printer. To ensure the highest level of productivity and reduce overall print time, all new models are also equipped with a standard gigabit Ethernet network interface and an automatic dual-blade cutter.

In those environments that utilize a complete workflow solution in conjunction with CGS, EFI, Ergosoft, GMG, ONYX and other leading RIP manufacturers, updated drivers will be available for download upon the release of the printers from their respective Web sites.

Precision Technology
To fully capitalize on the dynamic color range of the new LUCIA EX ink set, each new imagePROGRAF model employs two advanced one-inch print heads, each featuring 2,560 nozzles per color and outputting a super fine four picoliter (pl) droplet at a full 2400x1200 dots-per-inch resolution (dpi) to reproduce details with extraordinary accuracy and clarity. Paired with enhanced plug-ins and new, High Precision Printing Modes, these new imagePROGRAF models provide an extremely high level of photographic and proofing quality prints.

The new imagePROGRAF iPF8300, iPF6350 and iPF6300 are compliant with U.S. ENERGY STAR energy-saving standards and RoHS compliance standards. The new Canon imagePROGRAF iPF8300, iPF6350 and iPF6300 large format printers will be on display at WPPI booth 401 in Las Vegas, NV from March 8-10, 2010. The imagePROGRAF iPF8300/6350/6300 will start shipping in March for a manufacturers suggested retail price of $5,995, $3,995 and $3,695, respectively.

About Canon U.S.A., Inc.
Canon U.S.A., Inc., is a leading provider of consumer, business-to-business, and industrial digital imaging solutions. Its parent company, Canon Inc. (NYSE:CAJ), a top patent holder of technology, ranked fourth overall in the U.S. in 2009†, with global revenues of US $35 billion, is listed as number four in the computer industry on Fortune Magazine's World's Most Admired Companies 2009 list, and is on the 2009 BusinessWeek list of "100 Best Global Brands." Canon U.S.A. is committed to the highest levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty, providing 100 percent U.S.-based consumer service and support for all of the products it distributes. At Canon, we care because caring is essential to living together in harmony. Founded upon a corporate philosophy of Kyosei – "all people, regardless of race, religion or culture, harmoniously living and working together into the future" – Canon U.S.A. supports a number of social, youth, educational and other programs, including environmental and recycling initiatives. Additional information about these programs can be found at www.usa.canon.com/kyosei. To keep apprised of the latest news from Canon U.S.A., sign up for the Company's RSS news feed by visiting www.usa.canon.com/rss.

About Davis Business Machines, Inc.
Davis Business Machines offers an integrated suite of imaging, document management, and workflow management software. Follow news, photos and video coming from Davis Business Machines by subscribing to our news feed by visiting http://www.dbm.net/articles?rss or on Twitter at www.twitter.com/dbmnet. To learn more about our products and services, visit us at http://www.dbm.net or call us at 1-800-287-9326.

Smart System Design: How to Get the Information You Need from Your Document Management System, Every Time

Have you ever planned a lengthy trip to an unfamiliar place? Even if you choose an ideal location, you’ll probably be disappointed unless you define your expectations. Typically, this involves doing thorough research, gathering and organizing the information you need, and creating a detailed itinerary that reflects your expectations. If your trip requires a significant investment, you’ll most likely work hard to ensure that expectations are fulfilled.

Likewise, to get superior results from an electronic document management (EDM) system, smart vendor choice must be matched with detailed planning and intelligent system design. Whether you tackle the challenge alone or hire your vendor’s services team to help, you should start by analyzing, streamlining, and organizing the structured forms that drive your daily business processes. Insurance claims, invoices, applications, and other standardized documents all have unique properties. Each must be understood thoroughly. By asking the right questions about each document initially, you’ll eliminate costly mistakes. You’ll also increase the likelihood your EDM solution will deliver the information everyone needs – swiftly, accurately, and consistently.

EDM brings all of your core business information – unstructured documents (such as email or voice messages) as well as structured documents (such as your core business documents) – into one place where content can be searched, viewed, and managed. To ensure quick and appropriate access, you must know when, where, and by whom the content will be needed. Each document must be:

• Captured correctly
• Indexed thoroughly
• Stored in a useful format

Capture, index, access – it’s actually pretty straightforward – but only if you ask the right questions.

Capture correctly

If you’re capturing core business documents digitally, you need a structured methodology. Choosing the best method for capture – scanning, online forms, bar codes, etc. – ensures your solution will be well-matched to the type of information you need to store, but it’s just the beginning. A smart system design – the set of parameters you establish to ensure the capture process is governed by clear and logical business rules – is equally important to your success. A thorough document inventory and analysis, coupled with an appropriate scanning file for each document type, will ensure consistency and accuracy as each document type is scanned for digital storage and use.

1. Conduct a document inventory

Understanding your documents starts with a thorough inventory and analysis of the documents you use in your business. Ask yourself:

• What forms and other structured document types do we use routinely?
• Are there structured documents with similar functions that can be combined?
• What are the logical categories into which each document types should be placed (departments or broad categories such as invoices or legal documents)?

Collect a sample of each document type and analyze it carefully. Determine which content must be discoverable in response to employee needs, regulatory requirements, or third-party demands. Whatever information is critical for locating your core documents – customer name, zip code, document type, account number, amount of sale, balance due, etc. – must be indexed for quick and successful document retrieval. Consider which content needs to be locked down for restricted viewing to satisfy regulations or internal policies. Determine which groups should be authorized to view, edit, or delete specific content (such as social security numbers, medical information, or account balances) so you can assign rights accordingly.

2. Determine appropriate scanning profiles

To ensure consistent, correct, and complete scanning of the document types that are processed routinely by your business, you need to establish scanning profiles for each. This ensures the person scanning the documents will automatically have the right setup for scanning when a document type is selected. Study each document type, asking yourself if each is:

• One-sided or two-sided
• Single or multi-page
• Black and white or color
• Scanned as a single document or in batches

Also ask:

• In which format should each document be stored (PDF, TIFF, etc.)?
• What security needs to be applied to each document type, i.e., which user groups will be permitted to access the document?

Configuring the right scanning profiles for each document type simplifies the scanning process for employees and significantly reduces the incidence of errors.

Index intelligently

1. Establish required metadata

In order for documents to be found by everyone who is authorized to access them, each document must be classified thoroughly using key words, phrases, and document codes that identify the type and content of each file. A robust EDM system allows detailed indexing that goes far beyond the simple sorting most hardware allows. If you follow best practices for indexing and consult the staff who need access to the documents for their work during the information gathering process, there is no reason any document should become irretrievable… ever. Make sure you:

• Assign metadata to important data (for example, “zip code” would be the metadata that describes the data “17406” and “city” would be the metadata for “Dayton”)
• Determine the format for data in each metadata category (i.e., zip codes must be numeric, names must be alpha, customer ID numbers must be alphanumeric with 3 alpha plus 5 numeric, etc.)
• Decide which information on each document is important to ensure thorough indexing – not just to you, but to others within your organization
• Evaluate whether documents that have similar metadata categories (such as ‘ship date’ and ‘shipping date’) can be combined as one metadata object or must be kept separate

Access appropriately

1. Decide who needs access

Security concerns have increasingly taken the spotlight in recent years. All the regulation in the world can’t guarantee honesty or obedience. EDM, however, can – and will – if you choose a robust system and configure it properly. Ask yourself:

• How can our business divide its workers into logical groups and subgroups – e.g., directors, marketing team, HR team, accounting?
• Which users should belong to each group?
• Which document types does each group or subgroup need to access?
• What are the routine business processes for which each document type is used, or the specific processes that should be initiated upon receipt (digital capture) of a specific document type?
• How does each group need to interact with each document type? What user rights does each group require, e.g., viewing, editing, deleting, indexing, re-indexing, annotating, forwarding via email, etc.
• What additional metadata filters need to be put in place to permit appropriate group rights (such as allowing accounting staff to view information about amounts due, vs. blocking the data from view by marketing and HR employees)?

2. Define search parameters

Take advantage of a flexible EDM system by configuring searches that are appropriate for each group’s needs. That way, you’ll make searches more consistent, efficient, and fruitful. How does each group of users need to search for business content in your organization? Do your users need to:

• Search for information by department (accounting files, HR, etc.)?
• Query by document type (invoices, purchase requests, resumes, expense reports, etc.)?
• Locate specific content within documents? (If so, make sure that content is indexed for optimal results.)

By defining the parameters and categories for search, you’ll ensure that your staff’s searches are guided and efficient, and will supply the information workers need to carry out tasks and make appropriate decisions. If you decided carefully during the indexing planning process which information each user type needs to find on each document and created searches to retrieve it, authorized persons should be able to consistently find your documents 100% of the time.

Onward and upward

Capture, index, access. It sounds easy, and with proper planning, it is. After you have a system design in place that delivers your documents any time and place you need them, you can let your imagination run wild. Capture and storage are just starting points for effective automation of your business, but it’s critical to get it right. Invest time in careful system design so you can turn your first steps of digital efficiency into a groundswell of success.

Davis Business Machines offers an integrated suite of imaging, document management, and workflow software. Follow news, photos and video coming from Davis Business Machines by subscribing to our news feed by visiting www.dbm.net/articles?rss or on Twitter at www.twitter.com/dbmnet. To learn more about our products and services, visit us at www.dbm.net or call us at 1-800-287-9326.

Why Businesses Should Utilize an Electronic Document Management System

In today’s business world, the amount of paper a business manages can be endless. With each piece of paper, someone needs to file it, space must be used to store it, and on multiple occasions, someone needs to retrieve it. When you are talking about thousands and even millions of pages of paper, this can be a very time-consuming task, and therefore a very costly task. The costs mount up quickly, in the areas of wages for employees who are responsible for filing and retrieving documents, and the areas of storage space required to house the massive amounts of paper files.

It is also an on-going, never-ending task, requiring the time of countless employees. This is time that could be better used performing the tasks that they have their personal expertise in. The opportunity costs for using a paper filing system include wasted time, delayed customer response time, and wasted floor and storage space. In other words, the efficiency of a business is very much hampered by continuing to utilize a paper filing system.

The benefits of an Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) are countless. With an EDMS, you will be able to take all of paper files, put them through a scanner, and them throw them away, or if your too skeptical to toss them, you can store them in some off-site storage where you will hopefully never have to look at them again. All of your files will be stored electronically, accessible almost instantly by any computer within your office at anytime. You do not have to worry about misplaced files or somebody else already having a file at their desk.

The initial cost of converting to an EDMS is usually what keeps people from doing it. This cost consists of the time and money it takes to scan all of a company’s existing files into the system. To save time, a company can pay a scanning service bureau to scan all their files for them, and this will sometimes be the cheapest method as opposed to paying an employee, who is likely less efficient, to scan the files. Whatever the method chosen, the first year cost might be heavy, but these costs should be offset within the first couple of years.

Another route that a lot of companies take is not to scan all of their backfiles into the EDMS, but to start scanning files today as they come in, and leaving all previous files as they were. This allows the company to bypass a large part of the initial costs, while still enjoying the benefits of the electronic file storage. As time goes by and the companies appreciation for the system grows, they will slowly convert their older files into electronic images, allowing them spread this cost over many months or even years.

Once a company is completely paperless and utilizing an EDMS, their efficiency is greatly increased, their response time for customer support is drastically reduced, and their overall office clutter is eliminated. These improvements convert directly to more business and higher profits.

If that’s not enough to convince you, then this will. The company is no longer at risk to having their critical business information stolen, lost, or destroyed due to some unforeseen circumstances, such as Hurricane Katrina that destroyed thousands of business’s paper records. The EDMS can backup your files offsite so nothing will ever be lost, plus its security features will prevent unauthorized individuals from accessing the documents that they shouldn’t, a very difficult task with a paper filing system.

Digital Document Storage Reduces Costs

The average office worker spends up to half of their workday searching for simple information! No wonder it’s hard to increase production. A digital document storage system will not only increase worker productivity, but also reduce company costs.

Lost documents create ripples of inefficiency throughout any organization. Although small and medium sized organizations are often hit harder than large corporations, the effect is devastating across the board. In paper-based environments, digital document storage is a great alternative. These systems provide an easy-to-use, secure document storage alternative to ultimately boost productivity and reduce operating expenses.

Digital Document Imaging

The process of converting paper documents into electronic files serves as the catalyst for today’s innovative electronic document storage systems. These systems allow documents to be captured at their source and enable organizations to reduce manual operational errors which frequently result in lost or misplaced documents.

In general, today’s electronic storage systems are less expensive, more secure, easier to use and more reliable than traditional methods. Many companies can also choose to integrate scanning, storage and paper-to-digital technology into existing processes at any time for a more gradual and cost-effective transition.

Davis Business Machines can assist your organization today! Click here to begin taking advantage of our consultation expertise.