Xerox Exchange has an interview with Peter Crean, a research fellow at Xerox Research Center Webster (home of the DocuTech, iGen3, Nuvera, and other Xerox innovations) on the advances in color he has seen in the 38 years he has worked at Xerox.
As Crean points out in the interview, color imaging is has progressed at a rapid rate in the past few years:
Crean: We’re making color probably two or three times more accurate than we did four years ago. We’ve been able to put a lot of that back into our products; we’ve improved software. Things that we used to do in 2003 in the lab over four months, we’re now delivering to customers, and they can do it themselves by pressing a button in the field — in 20 minutes. This made a huge improvement in expectations. We’re on a wave. We’re still rolling with rapid technology improvements, like what happened to the computer six or seven years ago. We’re on a roll of making it better and better.
We’ve also come up with a lot more different kinds of color printers. Xerox probably has the widest range of printers, all the way from the newly announced 500-page-per-minute continuous feed system, down to $400 desktop machines. The challenge for Xerox, which prides itself on getting a consistent color package, is to make them all behave the same.
Discussion
By Gary Ampulski on Feb 12, 2008
For those of us who have been around for more than we care to admit, the rate of change in this industry has been incredible. I was a product manager at Xerox in the mid seventies when the company introduced the 6500 and the only thing that we could copy faithfully were comic strips and prints from 35mm slides for the real estate market. In fact, we even marketed a "Color Creation Kit" made up of markers and color film to create originals to promote the use of the equipement. Not exactly a replacement for a multicolor offset press. Its taken a while but Indigo, Kodak, Xeikon and others besides Xerox have all contributed to technologies that are changing the way color print is produced today. For those who know how to deploy it, new and creative opportunities abound. Its a wonderful world we live in today and technology continues to make it truly exciting.
By John Scott Thorburn on Feb 12, 2008
The advances in digital color quality are staggering. Canon's imagePRESS gloss optimization technology removed a signature defect in fuser oil-based toner systems and as a result commercial lithographers take electrostatic printing seriously. Corporate environments see the difference too, and they want it. The surface quality of the printed piece attracts the first attention, and the color brightness and color matching accuracy settle the question - it is a superb print.