But Vandebroek and the 600 scientists, engineers and software developers she leads in the Xerox Innovation Group (XIG) are working hard to change that perception. The company is in the digital- and paper-document management business now, and it's earning two patents a day on technologies -- from microprocessors to color sensors and steganography -- that often originate within XIG.
The company's annual report refers to "the True Colors of Xerox," meaning corporate values such as customer service, technological innovation and social responsibility. But the phrase has literal meaning as well. Here are a few of the research projects going on in the Color Studio at XIG's Webster, N.Y., campus.
-- The human eye can distinguish 1 million colors, but printers have a color "gamut" of just half that number. XIG has developed a process called spatial gamut mapping that fills in the missing colors with colors that the eye and brain will interpret as more detailed and realistic than would be the case if the most accurate colors were chosen based on a spectrometer. "Sometimes perception trumps accuracy as a goal," says color researcher Karen Braun.
-- In commercial printing, consistency counts. The first brochure should look just like the last one. So Xerox has figured out a way to equip printers with color sensors that watch pages as they fly by at 2 feet per second and tweak colors as the print job proceeds. The sensors and controllers can detect and correct color deviations far faster and more accurately than a human operator working with manual controls, says researcher L.K. Meshta.
-- A number of projects deal with security -- such as how to prevent counterfeiting. One, called Gloss Marks, can print an image that appears to have a second image embedded in it -- a little like a hologram -- in one pass. The second image can't be copied. And an image containing Correlation Marks looks normal but reveals a secret message when overlaid with a special grid.
Gloss Marks and Correlation Marks address a tough problem: how to secure a document for "a run length of one," says Reiner Eschbach, a lab manager at Xerox.
Conventional techniques such as holograms can give pretty good security at a reasonable price for thousands of credit cards containing the same hologram. But putting a unique hologram on a single card, while technically feasible, isn't economically viable. Eschbach's team dreams up low-cost methods that require no special paper, materials or machine modifications yet can uniquely identify and protect a single document.
The toner used in most copiers and laser printers today dates to 1938, when the particles in powder made from grinding up the lycopodium plant were found to have a good shape and size for printing. Now Xerox has found a way to create toner particles by growing them from nano-size particles to highly optimized sizes and shapes. The new toner is cheaper to produce and use and is more reliable. The particles are so fine and frictionless that a bottle of toner sloshes like a liquid.
But that's not the end of toner research. Vandebroek encourages her scientists and engineers to "dream with customers." One unfulfilled dream, she says, is to be able to print with white ink. "We have cyan, magenta, black and yellow, but you can't make white from that," she says. "We can create it. The question is, How do you bring it to market?"
In any case, Vandebroek says, customers have bigger pain points. Businesses print 4.5 trillion pages of paper annually and spend 10 percent to 15 percent of their revenue on document-intensive activities -- two to three times more than they spend on research and development. "And half the time, when I'm looking for a certain document, I might not find the latest version, or I might not find what I'm looking for at all," she says. "I have way too much paper lying around everywhere, and I can't organize it."
Solving those problems means redefining the document and rethinking how people work, Vandebroek says. For example, a Xerox prototype called Document Categorizer automatically indexes, categorizes and routes electronic documents. Using linguistic analysis and machine-learning algorithms, it applies probabilistic models derived from a collection of already categorized documents to assign new ones to categories -- such as marketing or technical support -- as they come in. Xerox is using the technology to analyze and route customer calls and correspondence, and a European customer hopes to use it to eliminate much of the labor in its mailroom.
But real-time color sensors and a quest for white ink are only what's glimpsed in a narrow look at XIG. At a higher level, it's all about the synthesis of images and information, says Sid Dalal, vice president. He says an era of ubiquitous imaging is dovetailing with an era of ubiquitous computing.
Dalal offers as an example a technique that Xerox developed by which an image that starts out in color can be converted to an encoded black-and-white image for faxing and then printed by the recipient in color. More broadly, "there can be metadata and a model from which you can create images," he says. "The image may not even be there, but the metadata will allow creation of a new image from an old image, and it's transferable to any computing device and network.
"We are really bringing the world of information and documents together."