Sharp Europe, has been honoured with three Outstanding Achievement in Innovation Awards from Buyers Laboratory (BLI), the world’s leading independent evaluator of document imaging products and solutions.

Sharp’s Pro Series Colour Production Printing Systems, MX-6500N and MX-7500N, received an Outstanding Achievement in Innovation Award for full-bleed booklet printing and control panel integration with EFI Fiery Command WorkStation – both industry firsts.

Also securing top spot was Sharp Cloud Portal Office - a cloud-based, hosted document management and collaboration platform that provides customers with a manageable, affordable way to share and access important documents from anywhere.

BLI’s semi-annual “Pick” awards are given to the hardware and software offerings judged to be the best in BLI’s comprehensive evaluations, which assess a wide range of the most important performance factors for buyers.

BLI Manager of Laboratory Testing, Pete Emory, said: “Hats off to Sharp for its full-bleed booklet printing. Whereas competitors require expensive, space-eating inline and offline options, as well as access to more expensive SRA3-size paper to create full-bleed  A3 booklets, users of the Sharp Pro Series can produce full-bleed, professional-looking booklets of up to 120 pages on A3 paper. And with the industry moving more and more towards table-style, touch-and-swipe interfaces, Sharp and EFI have found a way to raise the bar even further. This integration saves users the cost and space typically associated with having to purchase an additional monitor, keyboard, mouse and stand. And because the same display also serves as the main operation panel for the Pro Series, operators can switch between the two with ease.

Jessica Schiffenhaus, BLI associate editor, said: “Cloud Portal Office is very intuitive. Its no-fuss interface separates work into two overarching categories, My Docs and Others’ Docs, which are terms users can easily relate to,” she said. “But more importantly, given the rapidly growing mobile workforce, Cloud Portal Office follows workers wherever they go. Gone are the days of worrying about a USB flash drive or emailing file after file. As long as a user’s files are stored in Cloud Portal Office, they can access and share them anywhere - even in the meeting room.”

“It is an honour to receive these outstanding achievement awards for our innovative technology,” said Jason Cort, Director Product Panning & Marketing, Information Systems, Sharp Europe.  “These awards acknowledge our commitment to address the needs of our customers with reliable technology that truly keeps them competitive and productive.”