Jan 21, 2011: History of desktop printing in one book

Undertoad • Jan 21, 2011 1:47 pm
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No, it's art. French artist Xavier Antin set this up; it's four different desktop printing technologies, lines up so that the output of one printer becomes the input of another printer. In a row, they are a stencil duplicator, a spirit duplicator, a laser printer, and an inkjet printer.

He then did four-color printing and created a book. He had the stencil printer do magenta, the spirit printer do cyan, the laser printer do black and the inkjet printer do yellow.

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And that's the art installation. Doesn't look great, but it's kind of amazing that it works at all. Four-color printing was notoriously difficult and expensive before our modern era. If one of the colors is a fraction of an inch off, the whole thing is a bit of a mess. Modern printers can get it right for cheap, only because they manage the process with modern computing.

And maybe that's part of the point here.

installation via neatorama
glatt • Jan 21, 2011 1:53 pm
I have a hard time looking past those wooden stands he made. I suppose he was going for a "built by a 10 year old" look.
monster • Jan 21, 2011 3:51 pm
I like it. I imagine the fiber will be good for my digestion too
Pete Zicato • Jan 21, 2011 4:59 pm
I can see why he used four printers, but dot-matrix printers should have been in there before lasers.
Flint • Jan 21, 2011 5:30 pm
Pete Zicato;707172 wrote:
I can see why he used four printers, but dot-matrix printers should have been in there before lasers.

No doubt. I'm looking at a 9 pin impact printer sitting new in the box in my office right now.
zippyt • Jan 21, 2011 6:36 pm
Them Okidatas just dont go away do they Flint
aero geek • Jan 21, 2011 8:57 pm
He should hookup with the brick BMW guy - I'll bet they hit it off right away.:wstupid: