Ricoh buys Ikon

Ricoh will purchase office equipment distributor Ikon Office Solutions for $1.6 billion, reports printweek.

Details of the acquisition have not been released. Ricoh US's CFO, Zenji Miura, told Reuters that the company plans to replace Ikon's Canon products with its own printers and copiers in three to four years.

The acquisition will also see Ricoh add 400 sales locations in the US, Canada and Western Europe.

EFI has unveiled an option for EFI Fiery XF and EFI Colour proof XF, a prepress and production workflow tool to process digital documents easily and automatically on large to super-wide format devices, reports worldpressonline.

The XFlow automates pre-flight by checking images, graphics and fonts for correct embedding, and ColorWise gives print professionals control over specific and independent treatment of images, text and vector graphics.

XF's XFlow UniDriver enables print professionals to print directly into the workflow from Macintosh and Windows-based applications and adjust workflow settings to suit a specific print job.

Reportlinker.com has released a market research report related to the machine tools - equipment industry in its catalogue, says marketwatch.

The report profiles 372 companies, including many worldwide players such as Bobst SA, Dover, Graphics Microsystems, Eastman Kodak Company, Goss International Corp, Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP, Koenig & Bauer, Komori, Roland, Muller Martini Group, and Xerox.

The report provides separate comprehensive analytics for the US, Canada, Japan, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America and provides annual forecasts for each region for the period of 2000 to 2015.