NexPress And Canon Will Collaborate On Extending Open Standards

Business Wire, March 22, 2001

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

ROCHESTER, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 22, 2001

Standards to Enable Seamless Exchange of Data

Between Office And Commercial Printing Markets

Canon Inc. and NexPress Solutions LLC today announced that they will work together to promote open standards that enable the reliable and seamless exchange of digital color printing jobs between the office and commercial printing markets.

Wide acceptance of standards will help large commercial printers, in-house corporate printing departments and quick-printing businesses all to produce jobs interchangeably from the same digital files. Standards also will give the creators and designers of print jobs more control over the content and appearance of each piece -- even variable-data jobs, when every document is unique.

NexPress already supports a variety of open standards in the NexPress 2100 digital production color press. They include the Adobe(R) Portable Document Format (PDF) for job files, portable digital masters for variable data jobs, International Color Consortium (ICC) profiles for color management, and Portable Job Ticket Format (PJTF) implementation for electronic job tickets. NexPress is also a founding board member of PODi and actively participates in CIP4, CGATS and other industry standards forums to promote open standards for variable data.

With today's announcement, the company will collaborate with Canon, a leader in the field of professional and consumer imaging equipment and information systems, to extend the same standards to the office and quick-print environment.

"NexPress is excited to announce this important collaboration with Canon, a world leader in office imaging equipment," said Venkat Purushotham, president, NexPress. "Now people in the office market will be able to create traditional or variable print data content and have it produced either in-house or by a commercial printer with the confidence that the content will be exactly what they desired."

"Canon is committed to collaborating with NexPress in making digital color printing more open and user friendly across corporate and professional printing segments," said Ikuo Soma, Canon Inc. director and Chief Executive, Office Imaging Products Operations. "Our mutual commitment to open standards will provide the foundation for enabling the seamless data exchange from the office to the commercial printing environment."