In the 1950s, when RCA and CBS introduced color television, many people wondered about its necessity. Who needed to watch Edward R. Murrow or the Brooklyn Dodgers in color when they looked fine in black and white? For 20 years, people avoided the kludgey, more expensive color sets.
Sound familiar? It should. The computer industry is only slowly moving to color. It wasn't just the geeks who kept people staring at the green screens. ASCII type on a black background was the onscreen status quo.
Color equipment was too cheap in quality, yet too dear in price, for real-world business needs.
No longer. It's now easy to put color in and take color out of your computer. Products with prices as low as a few hundred dollars produce high-resolution digital and physical images. Color scan and print speeds, while still slower than bitonal performance rates, are fast enough for networks.
We asked some color hardware, software and paper media makers to explain why color is in greater demand in the workplace. They answered and (of course) added why you need to make your imaging system more colorful.
Bring photorealistic images to business. All communication, business or otherwise, is becoming more visual. Use photorealistic images and animation to add emphasis to your presentations. Insert identification photos to records. Scan images to complement text description. Color is coming to your desktop or network soon. It's a self-fueling spiral -- color printers get cheaper, making color images more prevalent, which in turn creates a need for more color scanners.
Online architectures and new monitors shine in millions of colors. So why print onto boring black and white?
Come to think of it, why watch Dan Rather or the LA Dodgers on a black-and- white RCA when you can see it on your wonderful new flat-screen HDTV in your Dolby-equipped stereophonic home theater?
Scan every Shape, Shade and Size
Epson (Torrance, CA 310-782-0770) covers both input and output with their scanners and printers. On the scan side, their EPSON ES-1000C ($850) sports an optical resolution of 400 x 800 dots per inch (dpi).
Epson emphasizes two features directed at the average business user. Auto-page segmentation separates text from images when both are scanned from a single page, which enables faster scans. Epson's proprietary Text Enhancement Technology (TET) improves OCR accuracy by automatic image cleanup.
The Actionscanner II ($550) is Epson's product for the first-time scanner buyer. The 24-bit color system prints at an interpolated resolution of 2400 X 2400 dpi. As testament to its vendor's emphasis on input and output, the Epson scanner is automatically calibrated to work with Epson printers.
The new Scantouch 210 ($1,000) from Nikon (Melville, NY 516-547-4200) complements their existing line of film scanners.
Designed for graphic designers, the Scantouch can handle color or black-and-white materials, reflective artwork as well as business documents. The optional Transparency unit turns it into a slide scanner.
Hewlett-Packard's (Palo Alto, CA 415-857-1501) color/grayscale desktop scanner model -- the HP ScanJet 4c scanner ($1,200) -- hits a resolution of 2400 dpi enhanced and 600 dpi optical mode. Visioneer PaperPort 3.0 software, which is included, makes for a good imaging-for-one solution. Its 30-bit color and special attachment turn the flatbed scanner into a film scanner.
Other bundled image-and-text scanning software includes: HP DeskScan II image-scanning software; Corel's image-editing software for PCs or, for Macs, Adobe's PhotoShop LE; and Caere OmniPage Limited Edition OCR software.
HP's DeskScan II v. 2.3 is the scanner's image-scanning utility. It lets you scan in two mouse clicks.
On the PC platform, DeskScan II v. 2.3 works with Windows 95 or 3.1. HP's ColorSmart rendering software makes automatic color correction if you are using an HP color printer.
Other multifunction abilities seem to be popping out of many pieces of hardware. The HP ScanJet Copy Utility turns your color printer into a copier.
One mouseclick scans text and images directly to either an office printer or a PC fax card. You can use an IBM-compatible computer, MicroChannel or Apple Macintosh computer.
For PC systems, the scanner includes software that enables OLE (Microsoft Object Linking and Embedding) image scanning and editing.
Without leaving an application like Microsoft Word, you can insert an OLE image object using DeskScan II as the source.
Once scanning is complete, the software will automatically embed the editable
image in the document.
The Canon (Lake Success, 516-488-6700) IX-4025 Color Flatbed Scanner ($525 for PC, $700 for Mac) aims at the home or small office customer (SOHO). Its enhanced resolution reaches 1200 dpi, more than adequate for just about everything. The optical resolution is 300 x 600 dpi. Canon's IX-4025 scans 20 seconds per page in color and 10 seconds per page at 300 dpi in monochrome.
It also comes bundled with OFOTO 2.0 and OmniPage Direct 2.0 software.
Printers Cover the Color Spectrum
Lexmark (Lexington, KY 606-232-2000) manufactures a slew of printers using a variety of printing technologies. Their low-end, low-cost inkjets help make color the standard for every imager. Mid-range color laser printers bring color to corporate workgroups at a more acceptable printing speed.
Their 1020 Color Jetprinter ($150) prints at 600 x 300 dpi. A page takes 2-4 minutes to print. The 2050 ($250) cuts print time to one page a minute and ups the optical resolution to 600 x 600 dpi. The Color Jetprinter 4079 Plus ($2,500), an inkjet, prints up to 11" x 17" full-bleed print pages to the borders of the paper. Their laser products include their Optra C ($6,000) and Optra C PRO ($7,000). Print at three performance levels depending on your need. Both units print at about three pages per minute (ppm) for color and 12 ppm monochrome. The differences between the two are price, internal memory and connectivity features. The Optra C packs 8 MB; the Optra C PRO has 32 MB. The PRO also comes network-ready with a built-in Ethernet adapter.
Panasonic (Secaucus, NJ 201-348-7000) enters the color business printing market with its elegantly named KX-P8475 ($7,000). The 600 x 600 dpi output comes with 8 MB of RAM. Upgrade to 24 MB for 1200 x 1200 output. It prints up to 14 ppm in monochrome or 5 ppm in color on LocalTalk, Ethernet and Token Ring LANs.
Sony's (Park Ridge, NJ 201-930-1000) color printing technology of choice is dye sublimation. Two new photo-quality additions to their line are the UP-5500 and the UP-D8800 (both priced at $7,500+).
The UP-5500 runs on multiple platforms and prints at a maximum speed of 30 seconds per page. It print on either transparencies or paper and features a menu-driven LCD control panel. The UP-D8800 outputs photo-quality prints at 97 seconds per print. You can set the resolution for either high-quality (300 dpi) or for high-speed 150 dpi.
Related Articles:
