Scitex

In my last post I referenced a time when Photoshop wasn't even a blip on the radar of serious prepress houses. When I first got into prepress (1985) it was a very different world. Images came from enormous drum scanners (like Hell Scanners) that spun medium and large format professional transparencies at very high speed on very expensive glass drums around high end scanner heads, and good scanner operators knew their CMYK values for various colors like neutral gray and (theorectical) flesh tones like the back of their hand.

Color correction was a time consuming process, and scans had to be top notch right off the scanner. Color correction to the scan had previously been done on the film by chemically etching it in wet sinks by hand with paint brushes. Recently the industry had largely switched from continuous tone film process to "half-tone" film which used half tone dots to create the images (as we still mostly use today). With the switch had come "Dry Etching" which was done not by chemical etching but by duplicating film at various exposure lengths through masks in vacuum frames.

Type was set somewhere farther upstream by typesetting professionals with expensive typesetting machines, which produced high quality prints. These were pasted up onto board layouts much like contemporary scrapbooking. In the prepress house there were enlargement cameras that took up as much as a 15' x 25' room which was used to shoot film negatives of the type and various layout items. Assembly was done by stripping together the film negatives of all the various elements on multiple layers that were then exposed in series onto one piece of film for each separation. "Stripping Departments" used many skilled men who sat at light tables all day long with tape and Exacto knives putting that all together.

But a new and very expensive technology had come to town: Scitex, an Israeli company who's logo was intended to be a high tech representation of two hands folded in prayer. Today the Scitex name is barely even spoken in the printing world, but from the mid Eighties to the mid Nineties Scitex reigned supreme in the world of prepress. Suddenly, you could handle your color correction and image retouching electronically, removing much of the necessity for film while producing a far superior product. I remember an old prepress veteran at that time remarking that you used to be able to look at hand retouched printing and say, "Wow, that's very nice retouching," but you could still tell it was retouched even if it was done very well. Now with Scitex you couldn't even tell it had been retouched if it was done well. And that changed everything.

For one thing, every skilled journeyman in every department knew that if they couldn't manage to get onto a Scitex machine their days were numbered. So there was enormous pressure and competition in that regard. The Scitex stations themselves were large computer stations that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, in some cases up to a million. Skilled operators were well paid, and Scitex used to operate three full time, always booked in advance schools in the U.S. (Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York), to which trainees were sent for a very expensive two weeks introduction and training. You might have two or three different stations as well as an film output device and the drum scanners that were hooked into a large mainframe computer room with tall cabinets standing shoulder to shoulder. They stored data on large tape reels, and when they were processing you could watch what they were up to on a series of red flashing lights on the front of each cabinet in the mainframe room. After you spent enough time watching those little lights blink you could more or less tell what the machines were up to and how close they were to complete processing. It was like some kind of hokey science movie or something.

It would be hard to overemphasize the importance and prestige of Scitex at that time, and I have no idea how much money they were raking in. Scitex subsumed and eliminated much of what had existed in Prepress, and there was no real competitor. All roads, it seemed, led to Scitex. But today, you can fit many times that amount of data on a dinky little flash drive on your keychain for $40 or less. A used Mac Mini would completely blow the whole system away in processing power and speed. You can accomplish far more with $800 worth of Photoshop than the most expensive dedicated Scitex retouching station (the Blaze Prizmax) with its proprietary retouching software. And that's basically what happened.

Desktop publishing came along at the end of the Eighties. The first desktop publishing setups were, to be honest, rather silly seeming, and it it was impossible to believe that they could offer any real competition to the Scitex giant. Maybe they could sit in the corner and set some type or something. Even as Apple computers steadily moved in the doors, and computing increasingly became faster and cheaper, I could never bring myself to believe that Scitex would really be left standing still while their entire industry was taken away from them by this dinky little smiling wannabe computer. Then one day an announcement was made: "By this time next year we will be completely Macintosh. If you want to have a job this time next year, make the switch."

I couldn't believe it. Moreover, I thought it a considerable business mistake. But I started making the switch. And once I did I was surprised. The computing ability of the Mac had indeed become equivalent to or better than Scitex was, and that was before even the Beige G3. Mac was an open platform and any third party could market software for it, so Photoshop 2.5, for instance, was actually better than the Scitex color correction and retouching software. (Quark was miserably inept compared to Scitex at that time, though it did improve considerably since.) The little Apple desktops were more prone to freezes and crashes than Scitex, but even a very expensive Mac station was only a small fraction of the expense of Scitex, and you could make hardware and software upgrades on your own. The competitive environment of the Mac allowed it to out compete proprietary Scitex. I wonder where all that old Scitex equipment ever got off to anyway?

These days people even use PCs for printing and prepress. After all, as Apple has continuously led the way in technology and improving the overall computing experience through the years, Microsoft – buggy, half-baked, and hacker prone though they may be – has indeed done a decent job of putting a down-and-dirty cheesy version of it in the hands of the masses. PCs may never be as sophisticated, cool, advanced, or cutting edge as Mac, but they are practical. We have seriously considered buying a PC ourselves on several occasions...but...well...I mean come on. As Spike Lee said, "Do the right thing." If money is the deciding factor, better a used Mac than a new PC. (Besides, we have kids in the house, you know?)


Photoshop • Museum Quality Photo Restoration • High-end Retouching & Photo Manipulation • Illustration • Logo Design • Graphic Design

fireofgodimaging@gmail.com