Renaissance for the man who pioneered laser printers
By Jamie Hamilton
Get your color toner from the man who
created the first laser printer!
That’s right—before HP, there was
Stramondo. Anthony “Tony” Stramondo, a physicist with degrees from
MIT and the University of California, helped invent the first laser
printer in 1978. HP consequently came out with its first model in
1982.
“Ours printed three times faster than
HP’s,” Stramondo adds.
After the first black laser printer
came color, in 1986. Stramondo’s company would make a color toner to
fit black laser printers, printing in a specific color like red,
green, blue, brown, and others instead of black.
While some of his licenses are still
used by some office equipment manufacturers, Stramondo came out of
retirement to enter the remanufacturing business after several
companies called him for consulting. “I just can’t seem to retire,”
he says.
KLE is his current project. It deals
in color “because that’s where the market is going,” he says; the
only black toners offered now are blacks that correspond to magenta,
yellow and cyan toners for various printers.
With 1000 SKUs, KLM can get “any
color toner that you are looking for.” The printer models that
correspond to the cartridges he produces are so many that it takes
four double-column pages of single-spaced, 8-point type to list them
all.
KLE also specializes in color toner,
sublimation toner, cleaners, coatings and security toner for
government applications.
Sublimation Toner
Changes Everything
Sublimation toner may change the way
companies advertise on buildings, the way a family designs their
bathroom, or the trophy that a bowling league will win after taking
the championship. In short, it could be a very lucrative industry
for the print world as well as remanufacturers.
In short, sublimation is the process
of taking a solid to a gas and back to a solid again; there is no
intermediate liquid state. For instance, users can print an image
directly onto a ceramic tile using toner by printing on a plain
piece of paper, and then setting it with a heat press at 300
degrees. The heat press takes it to a gas and the gas is then
pressed into the tile, sending it back to a solid as it cools.
“Instead of engraving trophies, they
are all printed now. You can do 60 plaques at one time, it takes
you 30 seconds to do 60 instead of engraving them at 5-10 min a
piece—a whole days work done in a few minutes. Now it doesn’t take
an artist, it takes a technician.”
Besides trophies, companies that
currently use sublimation create awards, T-shirts and printings on
metals and custom tiles. But soon, with the increase of home laser
printers, end-users may get interested in the technology themselves.
“Where is the one place you can’t
hang a picture?” Stramondo asks. “The bathroom. It would get all
wet. With this technology you could put a picture of a rain forest
in your bathroom made out of tile, or a backsplash of a family
portrait in your kitchen.”
The image is impregnated into the
tile in about 30 seconds. Since the ink is actually inside the
tile, you cannot detect any roughness or texture change when running
a finger across the image versus a blank section of tile.
Needless to say, sublimation toner is
becoming a hot commodity at KLE.
“At the show (Recharger World Expo),
we had a lot of interest because of buildings,” Stramondo goes on.
“High-end buildings can be customized with murals by placing tiles
on the wall with whatever pictures they want.”
A remanufactured sublimation toner
can be made from any regular toner. So, a company or end-user would
not have to change their laser printer to create a sublimation
print—just the toner. The price from manufacturer to dealer would
be about $2 per tile, Stramondo says.
KLE is ready for bulk
orders
KLE is set up to deal with large
distributors. With 50 % of its business going to Asia and Europe,
shipping a large bulk order to distributors fits in well with its
typical business operations. Even though 99% of its business is
done on a wholesale basis, there is no minimum order
requirement at KLE (online at http://www.colortoner.com/kle).
Located in Jupiter, Fla., KLE is in
prime position to ship to Central/South American, Europe, Africa,
and within the United States. It offers drop shipping and a
reliable 100% satisfaction guarantee.
KLE is home to HP, QMS/Konica
Minolta, Textronix, Xerox, Lexmark, IBM, Samsung, Panasonic and
Canon, including MICR laser toner cartridges. It also supplies
remanufacturers with toner, fusers, OPC belts, fuser oils and a
coating for OPC drums that makes them as hard as diamonds.
“We call the coating Osmium, after a
chemical discovered by the Laurence Berkley Laboratory,” Stramondo
says. “It makes the drums harder than diamonds, so they stand up
better during remanufacturing.”
Creating the First Laser Printer
With prices for color laser printers
declining, end-users and small businesses may now find the cost
effectiveness of lasers compelling. Remanufacturers will feel this
shift, says Stramondo. And what he says is worth its weight in
gold. After all, Tony Stramondo has seen the business change from
the beginning and now perhaps come full circle to the laser printer
he invented.
“In the early ’70s, I went to work
for Itek Corporation and designed a laser printer that would print
spy satellite data,” Stramondo says, recalling the story of his
pioneering device. “The idea of using laser printers derived from
the fact that they were using high-definition film then, and to
print that material using a dot-matrix printer would require an
entire room just to print a single photo. We saw that the laser
would let them print a one-micron-dot-size image, and so we designed
it.”
In 1978 he designed the first
desktop, plain-paper laser printer. It was about the size of an
office copier, measuring approximately 24”X 18” X 15” tall. “We
were able to do this in part because we used laser diodes, even
though the Japanese manufactures told us we couldn’t do it,” he
notes.
Stramondo joined General Optronics in
1980, where he created a desktop, plain-paper laser printer that
could print 34 pages per minute. This put him ahead of HP, who came
out with its 8 ppm version in ’83. Stramondo also consulted with
QMS on how to get into the laser business.
In ’83 he began selling the printers
retail himself. He started Office Automation Systems (OASYS), a
company that competed with the OEMs in selling laser printers under
the name OASYS Technology. He also sold his technology under
established names: Kyocera, Minolta, Memorex, NEC and Troy.
After retiring, he came back into the
industry through the remanufacturing market. He started a supplies
company and started recycling in 1986; the company name was Lasers
Edge. In 1990, it developed the dianippon drum for the OPC drum,
built on Stramondo’s specifications.
From Today’s Laser to Tomorrow’s
Toner: Color
Then came KLE, his current project—a
toner remanufacturing facility.
Founded in 1989, KLE has 12
employees, mainly technicians. It’s small and manageable, and
that’s just how Stramondo wants to keep it.
“At OASYS, I had over 200 employees,”
he says. “At Laser’s Edge, we had 75. I learned a long time ago
that the result was that we worked hard but made less money. Even
though you sell less, you make more because you don’t have the
layers of middle management to contend with.”
So, what does KLE see in its future?
“Color, color and more color,” says Stramondo—and once again the
industry is headed in the direction of this pioneer in the industry.
To contact KLE:
1-800-TONER99 (866-3799)
Fax: 561-745-2415
E-mail: sales@colortoner.com
Online: www.colortoner.com
by Jamie Hamilton— in
addition to writing business profiles in ENX, Jamie writes and
designs ads, brochures, catalogs, newsletters, and technical manuals
for companies in the imaging industry. She can be contacted at:
Tel/ Fax 502-896-1051 or e-mail her at:
jamiewriter@hotmail.com.
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