Metaphor For The Future

Document management has reached dizzying heights of sophistication with cutthroat competition among players in the market for office automation to deliver to their customers the very best. Bill Gates, the first and the last word in the infotech industry, goes a step further and pronounces: "In the future, computer users will forget about their applications and think about the document instead. We think that the document is the metaphor for the future." But, says Sunam Sarkar, deputy general manager, Convenience Copier Business, Modi Xerox: "Indian offices are yet to exploit the full productivity benefits of devices like photocopiers. The high duties on these products are a barrier to their widespread usage and if the government wants India Inc. to be globally competitive, it has to encourage the usage of all such devices. International photocopiers, along with computers and fax machines, are rated as the top white collar productivity enhancing tools."

The most advanced of digital office copiers, which will probably hit the Indian market sometime this year, will come with software enabling them to be operated from the desktop. Users will be able to manage network print and fax jobs from their personal computers without leaving their offices or workstations. Users will be able to check the settings on the machine and by clicking on portions of a representation of the product on their screens, engage certain features such as stapler, the sorter or the document handler. Paper supplies can be checked, image contrasts or orientation can be adjusted and print queues examined. But that's some way off. What's available now is not too bad either. Modi Xerox, the Document Company, and market leaders in the realm of office automation, has a wide range of black and white and colour copiers to choose from.

XEROX 5828 b/w: The Xerox 5828 was voted the 'Best Buy' in Europe last year, a model also manufactured at their Rampur factory. Asimplex copier with a cruising speed of 32cpm, the standard paper supply of 1,200 sheets is large and the price tag is competitive. You can make multiple copies of a single original in a hurry, thanks to the automatic single sheet feeder. The 20-bin sorter/finisher with in-line single position stapling makes it easy to walk away with finished sets. It includes a variety of automated image control features that help you handle photos, solids, bluelines, colours and other tough copy problems. It even eliminates background shadows that come from different paper stocks. For more information visit website http://www.xerox.com or http// www.modixerox.com. Other models to choose from include the high-end Xerox 5065 black and white copier with features such as 62 copies a minute, recirculating document handler, duplexing to save time and space, margin shift covers insertion, on-line and off-line stapling; the lower-end 5830 with a copy speed of 32cpm automatic two-sided copying, optional colour modules etc; the 5855, 5837, and the 5845.

The colour copiers available from Modi Xerox are the mid-volume Empress 5750 copier-printer and the Regal 5790 colour copier printer. The Empress 5750 provides an intuitive control panel with features and functions clearly marked marked and accessible to even the most casual walk up user. Advanced features: marker edit, auto-colour sensing and an easy-to-use edit pad which lets you highlight text, add colour and/or delete material from originals to create new documents. The Regal 5790 is a mid- to high-volume model with a 9cpm colour output speed. Sales are direct and through dealers.

Last month the company also launched its high-end network laser printer—the DocuPrint N32. The N32 has a high print speed of 32 pages per minute, a heavy duty cycle of 150,000 pages per month, true Adobe postscript as a standard page description language, the ability to condense multiple pages into one and a duplexing option. It is network compatible as it has an Ethernet card built into it. The uninterrupted printing feature offers the convenience of refilling the paper even while the printer is printing and it also has a finisher option which includes a moving stapler that can staple in three different positions and can staple up to 5,000 staples. Other features: auto tray collation, flash RAM allowing for instant software upgradation, offset collation which allows separate jobs to be stacked separately so that the user does not have to search through reams of output, a mail box with 10 bins each with a capacity of 100 sheets, toner conserve mode, inbuilt HTTP server etc. These features enable the product to provide complete solutions for the document cycle in networked offices. At the lower end, the lowest cost in the industry in fact, is Modi Xerox's C55, a full-featured colour laser printer whose compact design makes it the smallest printer of its kind. It offers productivity enhancing features unique to the desktop colour laser category. It can be used as a standalone machine not requiring a dedicated PC for it. Both the N32 and C55 are targeted at networked offices, corpo-rates, publishers, imaging companies and pre-press establishments.