By Ed Avis
Global Scanning, the company formed by the union of Contex and Colortrac, recently joined
APDSP as a vendor member at the Gold level. In this Q&A, Steve Blanken, general manager of the Americas, discusses the company’s market and products, including its innovative RainForest365 smartphone app.
APDSP: Welcome to APDSP, Steve. Tell us a little about the history of Contex and how
Global Scanning came about.
Blanken: Contex has been around since 1923. In the mid 1980s its new owners at the time decided to move the company into the large-format scanning business, and its first products were monochrome scanners. It moved into color scanning in the early 1990s. About 11 years ago it was purchased by a Swedish private equity firm RATOS, and is now owned by Procuritas, also a Swedish private equity firm. In 2013 Procuritas decided to expand its holdings in the large-format scanner market by acquiring Colortrac. They created Global Scanning as a sub holding company to handle Contex and Colortrac.
I spent 12 years with Oce before moving to Vidar in 1998, and became part of Contex when they purchased Vidar in 2001. Now I handle channel sales of both Contex and Colortrac brand in the Americas.
APDSP: Tell us about Global Scanning’s market space.
Blanken: We go to market through two channels, an OEM channel and a distribution channel. Colortrac scanners are OEMed to Canon, and HP gets Contex. Our distribution partners are National AZON and Synnex for Contex in the U.S. and The Drafting Clinic in Canada. The Colortrac brand is distributed through Paradigm Imaging in the U.S. and Canada. In South America we distribute through 10 different distribution partners.
How large is the reprographics market for Global Scanning?
Blanken: Reprographics is our biggest market space. Our scanners are used on the front ends of large-format printing systems, and as stand-alone scanners for archiving purposes. A lot of reprographics firms also resell our scanners to their end customers, such as AEC customers.
APDSP: Other than reprographics, what end-user markets does Global Scanning serve?
Blanken: There are a lot of other end-user markets for our scanners. The government is a huge market, mainly for GIS, engineering, and archiving applications. All the branches of the military use them, as well as state and local governments.
The textile market is also a good market for us. Our scanners are used in this market for scanning patterns for the fashion and upholstery markets. Special software is used to scan patterns, and this data is used to drive a cutter to cut the fabric for the product. These products can be clothing, upholstery for furniture, cars, planes, etc., or any other products that require textiles.
Another space is the packaging business. Our scanners are used with special software to compare packaging labels that have been printed. Let’s say you print 10,000 cartons or labels for a pharmaceutical company with the instructions on the label. If the ink bleeds a little in the printing process the information on the carton or label may get blurred or misinterpreted. If these are dosage instructions for a medication and a 3 becomes an 8, that can be a serious problem and open you up to litigation. So, our scanners are used to scan the labels or packaging as they come off the press; the special software then compares all of the characters of the scanned image to make sure there are no errors in the printing process. If an error is encountered, the printing press is stopped until the error is corrected.
APDSP: What’s the difference between Contex and Colortrac scanners?
Blanken: Contex scanners are designed for higher production, higher through-put, and Colortrac is the more value product. It’s like the difference between an Audi and a Volkswagen – both are quality cars, but the Audi is understood to be higher end. That’s how we position them in the market.
APDSP: What distinguishes Contex scanners from its competitors?
Blanken: Quality, throughput, and reliability. We’ve done tests against our competitors, and we have been the most productive when it comes to finished scans per hour or finished prints per hour, when you consider all the variables. There’s more to it than just how fast the scanner itself is. There’s also the software, the operator, and the hardware. Any one of those could be a bottleneck that slows down the throughput, so you have to take them all into consideration when you compare scanners. You make your profits or cost savings with productivity, not mechanical speed.
Our software is one of the keys to the productivity of our scanners. Color management, collation, sorting, limited indexing, reimage technology, accounting and other functions are done right inside the software. And all of our files transfer automatically to the network or selected destination on the fly. Contex scanners are also the most productive scanners when it comes to batch scanning or printed and collated sets. The reason for this is the Next Image
National AZON Zero Turn Scanning Productivity Center
National AZON Zero Turn Scanning Productivity Center
software. It has features combined with the scanners that are specific to this application and address the important productivity issues when it comes to batch scanning or printing.
Speaking of productivity, National AZON recently introduced a new product for our scanners called the Zero Turn Scanning Productivity Center. It’s a special shelf unit that backs up to the scanner. The operator faces the scanner and takes the originals off the top shelf and feeds them through the scanner; the originals exit the scanner onto a receiving table, where they automatically stack up in the correct order. The operator never needs to turn around the grab originals – it really increases operator productivity (click here for more information: https://azon.com/zero-turn-scanning-productivity-center/).
APDSP: What new products have you recently come out with?
Blanken: We have an app in beta now called RainForest365. It can be used with our scanners
to operate the scanner with your smart device, such as a phone or tablet. The scan is then transferred to the Rainforest365 cloud for sharing, collaboration, editing, archiving, etc. In addition, if you need to search for the image later you do not need to remember the name you stored it under, but instead you can search for it by a relative term. For example, if you had a bunch of images that were drawings of bridges, you could call up the images by the name “bridges” and all those images of bridges would appear. If you are more specific with the term, such as “draw bridges,” you can narrow the search even more. Another amazing feature of this app is you can scan an original drawing using the camera in your smartphone as a large format scanner. The app guides you in positioning your phone as you wave it over the drawing, and our software seamlessly stitches the image together. It can then be sent to the cloud or emailed to somebody. The image is just like you ran it through a scanner. Though it’s not fast and it is not meant to be, it is extremely convenient for one-off scans that you may need in a hurry to make changes, share, or collaborate on.
Another recent product is the Colortrac Smart LF Scan!. This is a portable scanner that
comes in its own carrying case on wheels. It’s very light, and can be run without a computer. The image can be saved to a USB stick. Utility companies are a big customer for this – instead of buying a scanner for each power station or plant, they can buy a few of these and just carry them from plant to plant to do the local on-demand scanning when needed at each location.
We do have some other new products on the horizon and you will be hearing about them in the very near future: www.bycolortrac.com
APDSP: Will you have some special offers for APDSP members?
Blanken: Yes, we plan quarterly specials. Your members should watch the APDSP Member Center for details.