Building the Digital Office Thanks to advances in digital technology, organizations are shifting the way they manage their document flow. With the growth of networked office environments, Internet and intranet communications, yesterday's document production standard is moving toward distributed printing and printing on demand, and away from the inefficient use of traditional photocopiers for document reproduction. The time-honored process of producing and distributing a document is labor intensive, requiring significant investments in time and equipment. Workers typically create documents on a PC, print originals on a laser printer, make copies on a copier, and distribute the copies through the mail, by fax, or by hand. This new method reverses the printing and distribution processes.
Some people are understandably wary of the new digital paradigm.
Konica has found that this is usually due to a lack of understanding about technology. In reality, the difference between copiers and printers are really rather small, involving how the input is provided. In analog copiers, copies are produced by transferring the image optically from the original to the copy. With today's digital copiers, the information is scanned optically from a piece of paper. The information is then converted into a digital image format, then processed and used to produce the copies.