Steven B. Bolte

Perspective on nonimpact printing in color

Use of color in the office and business environment is growing rapidly. In the 90s, color is becoming easier and less expensive to use and its application is moving from isolated color pages toward integrated color documents. Moreover, in parallel with this trend, color in documents is driving a paradigm shift from a text orientation to a pictorial and graphic one. Business applications cover a range of quality requirements for both full and highlight color documents. Non-impact printers for these applications are being manufactured based on numerous technologies, including xerography, thermal transfer, ink jet, thermal dye diffusion and even photography. We compare and contrast these technologies in terms of characteristics such as registration, image structure, color gamut, and stability. We then consider the systems impact of customer requirements such as ease of use and consistency of results across printers, demonstrating a need to hide the printer technologies and their differences from the system users. A need for standards in both the description of color documents in device independent form and in other aspects such as viewing conditions is discussed in this context.© (1992) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.