From room-sized machines to barely an inconvenience on your desk, laser printers are in nearly every office. But where did they start? Tom explores the origins of the laser printer.
Featuring Tom Merritt.
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Episode transcript:
Gary Starkweather was a scientist. Optical physics or “optics” was his specialty. That’s the study of how light interacts with matter. It could sound boring to some, I suppose. But it’s not boring to other physicists.
And it wasn’t boring to David DiFrancesco. David had spent some long nights at Xerox PARC working on 8-bit frame buffers with Dick Shoup. There he had gotten to know Starkweather during some of those long nights of research.
Starkweather knew a lot of stuff, including how to make digital matte film effects work. The most famous of these is the matte painting, of course, but there are other ways of working digital elements into a shoot. Like lasers. In fact, Starkweather had advised the embryonic Lucasfilm on the original Star Wars.
DiFrancesco was trying to learn everything he could about laser printing on film. How to take those digital effects and print them right on the film so it looked like the laser was shooting right out of the gun. Except DiFrancesco had bigger ambitions. He was trying to figure out how to print the whole movie. DiFrancesco had been a founding member of the Lucasfilm Computer Division that Starkweather advised. With their shared history at Xerox PARC and on Star Wars, DiFrancesco turned to Starkweather again as he was helping Pixar get started.
It was the right idea. In 1994, David DiFrancesco and Gary Starkweather of Pixar joined Scott Squires of ILM and Gary Demos and Dan Cameron of Information International in receiving a Technical Oscar for their pioneering work in the field of film input scanning.
How did optics physicist Gary Starkweather end up getting an Oscar? It began a long time ago, well 1969, in a galaxy far, far away, Upstate New York.
Let’s help you Know a Little More about the laser printer
Starkweather was from Michigan, born in the waning days of the Depression, January 9, 1938, in Lansing. It may seem obvious given where he was born, but he went to Michigan State University and got a BS in Physics. He went on to get a Master’s in optics from the University of Rochester in 1966.
He went to work for Xerox at its research center in Webster, New York, just outside Rochester. It made sense for an optics specialist to work for a company making copy machines. He was tasked with increasing the scanning and printing speed of one of Xerox’s fax machines.
In 1967, Starkweather realized that maybe you didn’t need to expose the original paper to the drum that created the printed copy. He wondered if it might be faster to use a computer to generate the original document instead of trying to copy it the way a copy machine did.
In 1968 and 1969, he made his first successful laser scanning and printing prototype. It used a laser to project an image on a drum that could transfer the image to paper. It is said that Xerox execs weren’t that interested. Whether that’s true or not, it fits the Xerox exec profile of the time.
1969 was also when Jack Goldman decided to found the West coast research center, PARC, in Palo Alto, California. Xerox PARC opened, as you may remember, on July 1, 1970. It became known as a haven for research away from the meddling eyes of executives. In 1971, Starkweather moved west.
All laser printers are a variation on the theme first composed by Starkweather. The document is converted by a Research Character Generator into digital information readable by a laser. The laser projects a negative of the image onto an electrically charged rotating drum of the printer. Photoconductivity releases electrons from the areas lighted up by the laser. Powder called toner electrostatically sticks to the areas that haven’t been laser-beamed. As the drum turns, those toner particles get transferred to the paper. Heat fuses the toner onto the paper, creating the image.
One big advantage of laser printing is speed. The page is rendered in a single continuous process. There’s no stopping to start a new line like in an inkjet printer.
Side note: If you ever hear folks talk about rare earth metals being important for electronics, you probably just hear that. They’re needed for electronics. Well, here are some of the actual rare earths that go into a typical laser printer. The laser is usually made of aluminum gallium arsenide. The drum is coated with selenium, though more and more often that is replaced with an organic photoconductor made of an organic compound called N-Vinylcarbazole.
Once Starkweather was at Xerox PARC, he modified a Xerox 7000 copier to make a Scanned Laser Output Terminal, basically the laser projector part. In 1972, Starkweather worked with Ronald Rider and Butler Lampson to add the character generator and the control system that would make the whole thing work smoothly. Lampson, if you recall, also got listed on the Ethernet patent and was one of the folks who made the Xerox Alto computer happen.
They called that first fully working laser printer EARS, for Ethernet, Alto Research Character Generator, Scanned Laser Output Terminal. The name almost tells the entire history of Xerox PARC. EARS served as the office printer for years and eventually developed into the Xerox 9700 laser printer that went on the market in 1978, two years after IBM released its own laser printer, the IBM 3800. Another example of Xerox doing the research and other companies capitalizing.
Canon would go on to pick up the slack and offer a lower-cost laser printer, the Canon LBP-10, which was a desktop printer. But Canon didn’t have experience selling to computer users, so they partnered with HP and Apple.
HP would go on to be known as the company that brought the size of laser printers down to the desktop. The HP LaserJet was released in 1984 for $3,500.
And Apple used Canon’s CX engine in the LaserWriter, which used Adobe’s PostScript, which Jobs had licensed for $2.5 million plus $1.5 million against future royalties. Apple got the rights to use PostScript and a 20% stake in Adobe in return. This solved the problem of each printer-maker having its own proprietary page description language. PostScript described the use of text, fonts, graphics, and images independent of the printer brand or resolution.
Laser printers need to have a bitmap of the whole page in memory because you don’t want buffer under-run where the printer gets ahead of the data. Color laser printers store an image for each of the four colors used to make the rest of the colors, CMYK as you may know them. That’s 4 megabytes per page. That need for memory made all laser printers, especially color ones, very expensive.
The price of laser printers came down a lot in the 1990s as the price of memory chips declined and the speed of peripheral cables like SCSI improved so you could rely on a PC’s memory for more of the print spooling.
Color laser printers are still more expensive because you need four toner cartridges and methods like a transfer belt to improve color accuracy. The belt passes in front of all toner cartridges instead of the drum, and the combined layers are applied to the paper at once. Still, laser printers are better at monochrome than color. Laser printer resolution is usually 600-1200 dpi, less than many inkjets.
But the toner cartridges for monochrome laser printers, while more expensive than inkjets, last much longer. Meaning laser printers are about as affordable as inkjet printers and less expensive to run.
And what of our hero Gary Starkweather?
In addition to winning an Oscar in the 1990s, he also joined Apple and invented the color management technology that led to Apple’s ColorSync 1.0 in 1991. It’s an API for the Mac Operating System that tries to match colors so they look on screen the way you expect them to.
In 1997, he left Apple to work on display technology at Microsoft, where he worked until he retired in 2005.
He was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering in 2004. He died December 26, 2019, at the age of 81 in Orlando, Florida.
Starkweather got his master’s in Optics in 1966, the year the Optical Society awarded its first medal for work in optics to David J. Richardson. The award became known as the David Richardson Medal, and Starkweather received it in 1991 for his work on laser printers.
Starkweather’s story could have been one of unrealized potential if he’d listened to the East Coast Xerox execs. It could have been one of obscurity if he hadn’t lent his talents to help the folks at Lucasfilm and Pixar, or if he hadn’t moved on to Apple and Microsoft.
But his story ends up a happy one. The man who knew optics helped make a world where we can print out crisp, clean representations of what we see on a computer screen and even know that any colors represented there are close to what the creator of that document intended.
In other words, I hope you know a little more about laser printers.