photocopies

[calimac]

One of my errands today involved a lot of photocopying, done at Kinko's, and this gives me a chance to give thanks for how much easier copies are to make than they used to be. I remember wet copying, which produced sheets of paper with the texture of oilcloth and printing in varying shades of grey. Let a pile of them sit in a humid environment for a while and they'd merge into an inseparable damp clump.

I also remember copiers with curved glass plates, because the camera rotated instead of slid as it recorded the image. This made it impossible to copy two facing pages of a bound volume at once.

Most of these machines were not too great at sealing the toner to the paper. Grimy hands and smudged copies were a common aftereffect.

Nor was the reproduction that precise. I tried an experiment on one of those machines: I copied a photograph from a book, then copied the copy, and so on. By the tenth generation it was a series of abstract dots completely unrecognizable as a photo.

All these problems have long since been solved. When I need to copy pages from a rare book, the copy will be as crisp and precise as the original - sometimes better, for if the paper of the original is browning, the copier can null that out and produce a white background.

Another thing I really like about the current photocopiers at Kinko's is their computer memory. If I wish to make back-to-back copies, I can have the machine shoot the images of a large number of originals before pressing the "Done" button and have it make all the copies at once. I've done as many as 50 pages that way in one session, and I could do more, except I want to double-check the results before going much further.

And much else. The one thing I don't like is accumulating copy cards from academic institutions I visit rarely. The cards usually cost 50 cents as a starter fee, and when I come back years later I either can't find the card or it's been replaced by a different card and the turn-in period is long expired. Still, it's usually cheaper than coins.

Which reminds me: bill-readers on the copy machines and/or the card vendors. Something else we didn't use to have.

Comments

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

My dad has a story about when he was in the Marines and he had to operate an original Xerox machine. The paper had to be put in large wooden frames. They were charged, then exposed to the originals, then lowered into a large box full of toner. Then, if I recall correctly, they had to be taken out and baked.

[lisa-marli.livejournal.com]

I remember a portable copier we had. You put the original and the transfer paper together, ran that through, then the transfer paper and the final copy paper together and run that through. Something like that. The copies came out brownish looking and felt weird. But at least we could do the copies at home.
Now I have an all-in-one ink jet- Yep, Color Copies that actually look good!

[k6rfm.livejournal.com]

Kinko's no longer exists, it's just FedEx now.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I went back and looked and, yep, the signs still say "FedEx Kinkos" on them. So, Kinko's for short it still is. (Even a complete change might not stop me. I still think of "Grove Street" when navigating around Berkeley, though I don't say that too loudly.)

[serendipoz.livejournal.com]

Not to mention ditto and mimeo.



Joyce