The scanning and OPI rivers:
not faster, but certainly wider

LAS VEGAS, Nev. -- What with the geometric expansion of on-line services, the explosion of desktop color and the creeping pagination dominance of Quark XPress, one would think that electronic imaging would be the bright spot in an otherwise drab NEXPO.

One would be wrong.

Like so much of this year's show, expectations wilted in the Las Vegas heat. Attendees wandered from booth to booth trying to be surprised -- and generally failed.

That's not all bad: Gee-Whiz applications tend to be punched up R&D efforts, not ready for Prime Time. If last year's Gee-Whiz gear survived until this year's show, there was at least an even chance that you could put out a newspaper with it.

Think of progress in electronic imaging as a flowing river: It doesn't move any faster than last year, but is considerably wider.

Here are some of the notable products we saw bob-bob-bobbing along:

Scanners
The Royal-Zenith drum scanner and its stablemates were the sole keepers of high-quality color for a lot of newspapers over a lot of years, Now they're picnic-table sized dinosaurs.

Desktop drum scanners (OK, tabletop scanners -- only the publisher has a desk that big) were everywhere again, but this time new software added value to the hardware.

Last year, most scanner manufacturers offered batch scanning. You could tape a bunch of images (black-and-white, color negative, color transparency, even reflective prints) onto one drum, scan it and have the software break it into individual TIF files.

Not bad for openers, but the widespread improvement in '94 was gang scanning, which goes a step further: Not only does the scanner pull the images apart, but you can manipulate each image individually before scanning.

Does the future of a free press stand on such morsels of techno-candy? Nope, they just save a few minutes here and there. But when you consider the ever-shrinking pre-press department, a few minutes here and there suddenly can mean a great deal.

The Itek 350i drum scanner was a design breakthrough that got a lot of attention in several booths this year, including Autologic, Information International Inc. and Prepress Direct.

Instead of redesigning in the mold of the old, picnic-table sized scanners like the Royal Zenith, Itek's engineers decided to economize on floor space by turning the scanner on end.

The result is a scanner unlike any you've ever seen (actually, the 350i vaguely resembles the world's largest Pez candy dispenser).

The footprint? A triangle measuring a mere 27-28 inches on a side. At that size, you can stick one in a corner of the imaging room and turn the scanning room into a smokers' lounge.

The scanner has pretty good work area as well: it sports an 18¢ by 12¢-inch imaging area and there's even a mounting system that uses centrifugal force rather than tape to hold the images on the drum, saving setup time.

At the other end, you can run this beast via an innocuous Photoshop plug-in or hook up a stand-alone imaging workstation via an Itek interface.

OPI servers
Last year, RIPs were a commodity item. This year they were joined by OPI servers.

The industry is finding out that OPI (Open Pre-press Interface, if you're keeping notes) is not only one of the two keys to desktop pagination (the other: page- and element-tracking), but it's not brain surgery to get one on the market.

OPI servers are combination traffic cops and databases, usually running on at least a Pentium or Power Mac, and often on a Sun SPARCstation.

You send a high-resolution TIF (and sometimes EPS) file to the server, which peels off a low-res version for the editors and stores the high-res file.

Editors, who are now dealing with a 72 dot-per-inch representative image instead of a 200 dot-per-inch production model, can freely rotate, crop, scale and otherwise wreak havoc on their pages with a color picture they can easily manage.

When all is done, the desk sends the page to the server, which substitutes the high-res picture for the low-res, and sends the whole thing to the RIP on its way to the imager.

Autologic and Hyphen, two of the first OPI suppliers, have repackaged their durable products. Information International's Diadem division has developed an OPI server out of its existing Onyx RIP for Diadem customers.

And there are some new "commodity traders" as well in the market: