Efi Arazi died today. The "Father of Israeli Hi-Tech", Efi had
a great influence on a generation of print innovators. I'd like to
remember him in this post for two industries that heavily influenced my career;
commercial photofinishing and stock photography.
In the pre-digital age, photo-finishers were nearly 100% silver
halide-based. "Photographic quality" was the standard and other
color solutions were far inferior. But in the late 80's an improving
color laser technology represented by the Canon CLC 500 offered professionals
the first "good enough" color quality in a much faster turn time and
lower price than photographic prints. But the CLC 500 was still just a
color copier in many ways, with accessories like slide carousel changers the
only real hat tip to production speeds. Enter EFI. Efi Arazi's
company created print controllers for digital devices like the CLC 500,
allowing for printing from multiple "workstations", which were just
very basic PCs or Macs. Suddenly commercial photo-finishers had a new
production tool from which they could turn around color prints in minutes
rather than hours as well as creating a pre-RIPped queue for upcoming jobs.
It was truly a major breakthrough for the photo industry and proved that
digital technologies were really the wave of the future and drove the growth of
high-volume scanning via technologies like Kodak PhotoCD.
But before Efi disrupted the color copy business, he was key in
developing the first CCD scanner. Taking learnings from his work at MIT
and with NASA, his company Scitex, the first Israeli high-tech firm, created
many innovations for the commercial printing industry. But the CCD
scanner is what changed the stock photography industry forever.
Before the Scitex SmartScanners arrived, getting photographic imagery to
print required a tedious and expensive process using drum scanners and oils.
The cost for dropping photos into your printed piece often ran over $250.
Using CCD technology to capture slices of the image via a two-dimensional
array, flatbed and transparency scanners were born.
Once it was possible to remove much of the labor costs from the scanning
process, Scitex continued to innovate in speeding up the workflow while
continuing to improve the quality of the resulting files. Today this
technology is the backbone of any digital scanning device.
For my old company Corbis, this allowed for our grand scheme of building
a multi-million image digital library that was the gateway for today's stock
photography business. The cost-per-scan could be reduced greatly, and
with a significant improvement in quality over the floundering PhotoCD. Over
much wailing and gnashing of teeth from commercial printers who used scanning
as a profit center, digital stock photography became the norm.
While Efi is gone, his legacy lives on for me in the many, many friends
I have made that were directly touched by his genius. To my colleagues
who were so influenced by him who are now spread out around the print business, and
those that have moved on to other industries, he lives on through you. We
truly have lived through a golden age of innovation, driven in a very big part
by a small country in the Middle East.
