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.