Editorials

The new age brings many exciting new projects and breakthroughs, one of these being 3D printing. 3D printing may seem like a brand new concept but in fact the first working 3D printer, was created in 1984 by Chuck Hull of 3D Systems Corp.

It has recently broken new grounds and researchers and scientists are trying to make it a widely used technology.

3D printing is a process of making three-dimensional solid objects of practically any shape from a digital model. 3D printing is accomplished by using an additive method, where successive layers of material are laid down in different shapes.

Becoming an environmentally friendly company is a big concern for many business owners. There are many reasons why one would want to run a “green” office.

Becoming green will help reduce your carbon footprint and significantly reduce your energy bills, while helping you develop a reputation for being an honorable company, which will create new business opportunities.

Many people might be under the impression that the only way to go green is to completely cut out printing from your business plan. But throwing away the printer isn’t practical for any office.
Companies need to focus more on being mindful of what they print, how they print, what they use to print and what they print on.

By Lynn Nannariello, BLI Assistant Managing Editor, Sept. 24, 2013

The expression “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is particularly true when it comes to digital duplicators, a tried-and-true technology that has been around for decades. When BLI asked RISO Marketing Manager Suzanne Farley what has changed most over the previous generation of the company’s duplicator products, she said that the devices have become more environmentally friendly, offering such features as ECO mode. According to the company, ECO mode reduces power consumption without compromising quality. When BLI recently tested a group of RISO’s current line of digital duplicators, it, in fact, found no visible difference in the image quality output produced by the RISO EZ391U with ECO Mode turned on and that produced with ECO Mode turned off.

By Lisa Reider, BLI Senior Product Editor, Scanners and Environmental

The latest offering out of Fujitsu’s R&D department is the ScanSnap SV600, an overhead scanning solution that captures images without contact. The overhead-mounted cameras scan images from 1" x 1" to 11.8" x 17". The device automatically recognizes when pages are turned while scanning books or magazines, for example, to help move the capture process along. The multi-crop feature allows multiple documents within the scan area, such as business cards, to be scanned, cropped and saved as individual images. And according to the company, scans can be initiated at the touch of a button. As with some other ScanSnap scanners, the unit comes with ScanSnap Manager, ScanSnap Organizer, Rack2-Filer Smart and Magic Desktop. Adobe Acrobat, ABBYY FineReader for ScanSnap, CardMinder and the Easy Book Creation utility are also included.