The result of the above developments in how color was handled again changed the face of the industry in the same way the first part of the DTP revolution had heavily impacted the monochrome business. In the high-end color era, specialized service companies handled all color work. Desktop color with the Mac, Quark XPress, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator changed all that. Publishers largely brought color in-house for newspapers and magazines. Skilled Mac operators handling the key programs became the important people in the publishing production space. Every key designer would now be working with a big fully loaded Macintosh instead of a set of felt tipped pens.

During the 1980s and into the early 1990s imagesetting had transitioned from being output of monochrome pages to a move to color. Developments in the power of PostScript RIPs and enhancements to PostScript output quality moved the imagesetter to being color output devices producing high-quality color screening. The big debate at the time was about the quality of color screening with discussions about the benefits of rational and irrational screening. The high-end color suppliers would claim that the only way to output color separations was on one of their output devices in their language rather than via PostScript on a flatbed or internal drum imagesetter. The matter was settled in favor of the PostScript approach after the very expensive Seybold screening tests in which every major supplier participated. In a blind assessment when the judges had no idea whose output they were looking at, the winners were the typesetting companies of Linotype-Hell and Agfa. That was probably the final nail in the coffin of high-end color.

As we moved into the 1990s the first moves to kill off the imagesetter and the era of computer to film (CtF) were taking place. This was the arrival of computer to plate (CtP). CtP actually started in the 1970s with companies like Eocom, LogEScan and Chemco who were trying to image printing plates in remote newspaper plants. The technology failed at that time because there no suitable plates, as well as the technology with the lasers at that time did not really work. The resurrection of CtP started in the mid 1980s in Denmark with Purup Electronics and Hope Computing, but again it was limited because of the plate problem. It was only when the Hoechst Ozasol N90 plate, the first dedicated CtP plate, was introduced in 1991 that the move to CtP really started. Hope computer was acquired by Krause Biagosch, but the first successful players were Gerber and Crosfield, both of whom aimed their products at newspapers where high-resolution output was not required. Over the next few years many other companies launched products into this area. New plates were introduced from most of the plate suppliers using either silver or photopolymer technology. All the machines used visible light lasers outputting red, blue or green light. Everyone projected that drupa in 1995 was going to be the major rollout from all companies of the CtP products that would make the industry switch from CtF to CtP. We all expected major things of the new Linotype-Hell Gutenberg, the latest Gerber Crescent, the new Agfa, Dainippon Screen, Krause and Scitex products, as well as products from many new players such as Optronics. Instead Kodak and Creo threw a big spanner in the works that stopped the market dead for a time in commercial printing. The spanner was Kodak’s new thermal plate and Creo’s Platesetter.