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KODAK of the United States and Fuji of Japan are just two of the
international photography organizations that have survived digital
technology. Digital technology made film photography obsolete.
Digital cameras are built in in most cellular phones today.
The film camera has not only all but disappeared
from stores, but it may be soon be supplanted as a major tool of
movie makers. Already, full-length quality movies are being made by
producers using hand-held digital cameras.
It all started when Haloid, a company making
photographic papers in Rochester, New York, decided to fund the
research for a dry copier. Rochester was the home of Kodak, and
Haloid was one of the few that thrived producing ancillary products
to the camera industry.
The basic method was invented by Chester
Carlson, a patent agent, and the result of the research was the
Xerox machine. The Xerox story is told like a novel by John H.
Dessauer, executive vice president of Xerox, in his book, My Years
With Xerox, published in 1971. When the Xerox patent ran out in
1982, it was suddenly faced with a host of competitors, among them
the Fuji organization. Fuji was the first company licensed by Xerox
to produce its copiers. Today, it is the Xerox technology among
others that had kept Fuji growing when its color photographic film
was edged out by digital photography.
With the coming of the personal computer, there
arose a need for faster copiers to match the speed of the text
production of personal computers which led to the creation of laser
printers. Small printing machines were developed that became useful
for small-run requirements not big enough to require a regular
printing job.
A few weeks back, the Xerox process celebrated
its 70th anniversary at the Drupa 2008, a quadrennial printing fair
in Dusseldorf, Germany. During the last two decades which showed the
rapid progress in printing in the wake of the communication
revolution, most of the latest developments in printing were first
exhibited in Drupa.
But what was celebrated was not the copier but
digital printing. The copier is now a small part of the Xerox
organization which is more of a printing industry company.
As the Drupa literature made clear, “the term
‘digital printing’ is not really the exclusive preserve of the
electro-photographic (Xerox) process, since inkjet printers,
magnetography and electron beam printing are all just as digital in
their operation. However, the trade world has resigned itself to the
fact the whilst there may be various different digital printing
processes, in ordinary parlance, the term is exclusively used for
the electrographic process.
“A digital printer contains a light sensitive
drum that is electrostatically charged. A laser beam or laser diodes
strike the points that will print, discharging them. Subsequently,
magnetic dry toner is applied in the drum and adheres to the exposed
image areas, before being transferred to the paper. In order to fix
the dry toner to the paper, the paper is heated by hot rollers and
the toner fuses to the paper.
“Over the last 20 years this basic principle
has been further developed in the form of color printers. Besides
black, these can also print additional special or four process
colors. In order to achieve this, the four colored toners are
transferred on to a blanket, one after the other, and printed onto
the paper in a single process. A single manufacturer, HP Indigo,
uses liquid rather than dry toner, and this enables it to represent
halftone dots, as in offset printing, and allows it to come closest
to the look of offset printing. In the most recent development,
Xerox has developed colored dry toners that no longer require heated
rollers but are flash-fused to the paper without the paper as a
whole being heated.”
We now have color copying machines. And laser
printers that print materials from a computer faithfully in what is
known as a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) process. So now PC
users can print out materials in color.
The whole process is incorporated into huge
printing machines that can produce newspapers in color. This is
basically the process used in our major newspapers today.
But already there is a new development in
newspaper printing that improves the efficiency of printing, making
it faster at lesser cost by eliminating a major step in the process.
opinion@manilatimes.net
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