BLI editors have announced winners of BLI’s coveted “Outstanding Achievement” awards in the office imaging hardware and solutions categories. Selected from among the scores of products evaluated in BLI's lab during the previous six months, these awards acknowledge those products that bring capabilities that stand out for their extraordinary ingenuity, usefulness, energy efficiency or value.
Electronics for Imaging, Inc.
EFI Fiery VUE
Outstanding Achievement in Innovation
Hewlett-Packard Company
HP EcoSMART Fleet
Outstanding Achievement in Innovation
Konica Minolta Business Solutions, U.S.A., Inc.
Outstanding Achievement in Control Panel Design
Samsung Electronics America
Samsung SyncThru Admin 6
Outstanding Achievement in Innovation
Get More Out of Fiery MFPs—for Free
Many MFPs are sold with EFI’s Fiery controllers to increase image-processing speed and color fidelity in graphics-intensive environments. But for the most part, it’s only a select few (like the artists in the marketing department) that reap the benefits of a Fiery investment. EFI aims to change that with its Fiery VUE application, an innovative document assembly utility that has earned an Outstanding Achievement award from BLI’s editors.
Available as a free download for Fiery users, the solution makes assembling and producing professional-looking documents easy: Users simply drag files they want to include from their PC into the central display panel, where they can be arranged and then previewed in either 3D layout or 2D thumbnail views and modified before being printed. “In testing, we found Fiery VUE’s unique 3D view of documents to be a powerful and innovative approach,” said BLI Associate Editor Dan DiGiacomo. “The feature enables users to see exactly how their documents will be output, which saves time and avoids wasted prints.”
“Fiery VUE enables fast production of professional-looking documents while dramatically improving productivity and reducing waste,” said John Henze, vice president of Fiery marketing at EFI. “EFI is committed to delivering products that make our customers more profitable and efficient, and this recognition by Buyers Lab is strong testament that we’re doing just that.”
For more information, read the full Solutions Report.
HP EcoSMART Fleet Enables Greener Printing and Quantifiable Cost Savings
After hands-on lab testing, HP EcoSMART Fleet has been honored with an “Outstanding Achievement in Innovation” award from the editors at BLI. This unique analysis utility can help administrators and managers within an organization track the power and paper consumption (and resulting carbon footprint) of their output device fleets. The solution works with HP Web Jetadmin—itself a Summer 2012 “Pick” award winner as “Outstanding Device Management Solution”—but offers data and analysis tools that BLI has not seen in other device-management or print-management platforms.
“The benefits HP EcoSMART Fleet delivers should be of interest to every organization,” said BLI Senior Editor Jamie Bsales. “First, it shows in clear detail the energy and paper consumption tallies of the devices it has been set to monitor. This can reveal power-hungry machines that it would pay to replace or that need their sleep-mode settings altered, as well as show where end-user behavior modification is in order—for example, to encourage duplex printing. Moreover, it allows an administrator to quantify the real-world cost savings attainable by making such modifications to the fleet and end-user habits.” This can help satisfy an organization’s “green” initiatives, while simultaneously driving down output costs. Considering that managers in many organizations—especially government agencies—must demonstrate improvement when it comes to their departments environmental goals, HP EcoSMART Fleet can be a timesaver versus manually trying to calculate savings on a monthly basis.
For more on HP EcoSMART Fleet, see our lab-tested Report.
Konica Minolta’s Customizable Control Panel Advances Ease of Use
Konica Minolta has been honored with a Summer 2012 “Outstanding Achievement Award” for its new control panel interface, as seen on the Summer 2012 Pick-winning bizhub C754 and bizhub C654.
“Konica Minolta continues to impress with its innovation,” said George Mikolay, senior product editor for A3/Copier MFPs. “Time and again, whether it be its award-winning My Tab for print driver customization, or being the first manufacturer to offer biometric authentication, to now its new control panel interface, Konica Minolta continues to push the boundaries to simplify the overall user experience for its customers.”
The new 9" electrostatic display supports touch-and-swipe scrolling, and automatically wakes up from energy-save or sleep mode when it detects a finger about an inch away. “But what really sets this panel apart from the pack is the ease with which users can jump between three different control panel interfaces,” said BLI Manager of Laboratory Testing Pete Emory. “Users can switch to any of the interfaces they wish on the fly, providing unmatched flexibility for users to choose the interface that best fits their needs. Even the numeric keypad is available as both touch-sensitive and hard keys depending on each individual user’s preference.”
Carrying over the best of the old interface, along with new and enhanced capabilities, the Quick Menu interface is very graphical, utilizing both text and icons, with most of the settings for typical jobs accessible from the first screen, including color mode, paper source, reduction/enlargement and simplex/duplex. “Even finishing is now selectable from the first screen,” said Mikolay. “And when you add in the accurate toner gauges on the main display of the Quick Menu interface, users are essentially provided with all the settings and capabilities needed for a typical copy job without ever having to leave the first screen.”
The second interface, the Basic copy menu, has also been redesigned, and fits the bill for users looking for more programming simplicity. The Timeline interface, which is accessible via the Application key, features a sliding bar activated by touch-and-swipe that allows users to easily jump over from menu to menu. The layout is intuitive here too, and menu selections are clearly named. Users can also save up to 48 settings for frequently used jobs. For even more flexibility, support for Konica Minolta’s PageScope My Panel Manager allows a “personal” interface to be created and stored for each registered user. In addition to displaying a default home page, language, and so on, My Panel Manager enables “scan to me” and “scan to home” button settings, so users can quickly send documents to their own email address or preferred folder destination, without having to enter those destinations manually. Touch keys are bright and highly responsive, and the control panel can also be tilted freely. The Guidance hard key is dynamic, pulling up information on the particular setting that is currently selected.
“Receiving 'Pick' awards from BLI, as well as an award for our recently launched INFO-Palette Design, further supports the leading innovation, proven performance and exceptional capabilities of the bizhub MFP family of products and solutions,” said Kevin Kern, senior vice president of marketing, Konica Minolta Business Solutions U.S.A., Inc. “We are always striving to ensure that customers can count on Konica Minolta for their entire scope of document management needs, and these awards further demonstrate our commitment to innovation that is necessary in obtaining this objective.”
Samsung Adds Unique Features to SyncThru Admin
As businesses continue to grow and evolve, so does their need for robust fleet management solutions. Samsung SyncThru Admin 6 offers all the essential features expected in a fleet management solution, plus a few BLI has not seen in other solutions in the category, such as the ability to send device alerts using Twitter and to report against company service-level agreements (SLAs) and MPS agreements. These advanced features have earned SyncThru Admin 6 a prestigious “Outstanding Achievement in Innovation” award from the editors at BLI.
“Twitter alert functionality is unique among the solutions BLI has tested,” said BLI European Solutions Technical Specialist Idris Shogbanmu,. “It enables administrators to get succinct device alerts even when they are out of range of the organization’s network and can be configured to show the specific information required to determine which device has the error and what action is needed. The administrator can then easily pass that information to their relevant support colleagues or resolve the fault themselves, whether they are out of the office or on-site.”
Another innovation: Within its reporting functionality, SyncThru Admin tracks device uptime, downtime and fault resolution times, which allows IT personnel to view data on error response rates and how the IT department or MPS provider performs against its SLA targets. Three analysis areas are available—Operation Rate History, Supply Provision Rate History, and Trouble Fix Rate History—so managers can see SLA performance in a number of dimensions. “Analysis relating to company SLAs, like that in SyncThru Admin 6, is ideal for IT personnel working to SLA targets,” said Shogbanmu. “It makes reporting on company service levels quick and easy and also provides flexible options to report per device, or per device groups, as well as across a range of time periods.”
“BLI’s recognition for the Samsung SyncThru Admin 6 once again demonstrates our commitment towards innovative solutions across the business sector,” said Joosang Eun, senior vice president of IT Solutions, Samsung Electronics. “These nominations reflect our technological superiority in developing major leading solutions that enable businesses to achieve greater productivity with improved cost saving benefits and we are committed to constantly provide the best solutions to our customers.”
About Buyers Laboratory LLC
Buyers Laboratory LLC (BLI) is the world's leading independent provider of analytical information and services to the digital imaging and document management industry. For over 50 years, buyers have relied on BLI to help them differentiate products’ strengths and weaknesses and make the best purchasing decisions, while industry sales, marketing and product professionals have turned to BLI for insightful competitive intelligence and valued guidance on product development, competitive positioning and sales channel and marketing support. Using BLI’s web-based bliQ and Solutions Center services, 40,000 professionals worldwide create extensive side-by-side comparisons of hardware and software solutions for over 15,000 products globally, including comprehensive specifications and the performance results and ratings from BLI’s unparalleled Lab, Solutions and Environmental Test Reports, the result of months of hands-on evaluation in its US and UK labs. The services, also available via mobile devices, include a comprehensive library of BLI’s test reports, an image gallery, hard to find manufacturers’ literature and valuable tools for configuring products, calculating total cost of ownership (TCO) and annual power usage. BLI also offers consulting and private, for-hire testing services that help manufacturers develop and market better products and consumables.
For more information on Buyers Laboratory LLC, please call (201) 488-0404, visit www.buyerslab.com, or e-mail info@buyerslab.com.
For more information on Buyers Laboratory, please call (201) 488-0404, visit www.buyerslab.com or www.buyerslab.com/solutions, or e-mail info@buyerslab.com.
