Brother purchases Mutoh in £170m deal
Brother Industries has officially acquired machine manufacturer, Mutoh, which is now a consolidated subsidiary of the wider Brother portfolio
Fiery has announced the official launch of XF 9, which adds integration with a number of its existing colour management and variable data printing solutions
Fiery, a software developer of print digital front ends (DFEs) and workflow software, has announced the launch of Fiery XF 9, the latest release of Fiery’s software RIP, colour management, and workflow solution designed to streamline wide-format print production.
Fiery XF 9, which was the winner of the 2025 Pinnacle Award for best large-format RIP software, adds a set of new capabilities that the company says “unlock new levels of value out of your large-format print operations.”
New features include integration with both Fiery’s FreeForm Create 2.0 variable data printing (VDP) software and its ColorGuard cloud-based colour control solution.
Speaking to SignLink in an interview ahead of XF 9's official launch, Frank Hueske, product line manager at Fiery, said: “If you look at Fiery as an organisation across our Command Workstation and all the different applications, logically we try to utilise and integrate what is available across all our different products.
“If you make it easier for our users to use the same applications across different use cases, it makes things so much better, even from a learning curve or decision-making angle. Integrating ColorGuard and FreeForm Create is another step forward.”
XF 9’s compatibility with FreeForm Create 2.0 adds a range of personalised printing capabilities to the software. With this addition, wide-format print providers can use a single, unified VDP creation process across all printers managed by a Fiery DFE, without additional tools or device-specific workflows.
The aim is to simplify the creation of targeted and versioned materials with custom images, text, and barcodes that can drive stronger customer engagement, with more flexibility and fewer bottlenecks to production. Fiery FreeForm Create 2.0 is free to download from the Fiery website.
The integration of Fiery ColorGuard, a solution designed to enable the production of consistent colour across all devices, brings tools to verify colour quality, correct deviations, and evaluate colour performance over time, as well as providing proof of colour compliance. Cologuard is available at no additional cost to XF users throughout 2026.
In addition, XF 9 offers an AI-powered print bleed option, which can automatically generate ‘gallery-style’ canvas-wrap edges. The option also aims to avoid print quality issues caused by missing bleed content not created at the pre-press stage.
John Henze, vice president of sales and marketing at Fiery, adds: “Large-format print demands consistent, top‑tier output.
“With our award-winning Fiery XF 9 RIP software, achieving excellent results at all times is no longer the complex challenge it used to be – and it’s all driven through Fiery Command WorkStation, the same interface print teams rely on across commercial and industrial print. That unified experience is what delivers speed, ease, and reliability customers expect.”
