Patrick Henry appears to be like again on the lifetime of Xerox’s Peter Crean, one of many graphic communications business’s most groundbreaking technologists, who handed away final month.
Peter Crean (heart) with colleagues Henry Freedman (Picture Check Labs), Peter Dundas (Picture Check Labs), Robert Eller (Rochester Institute of Know-how), and Eric Zeise (Picture Check Labs).
The graphic communications business misplaced one among its most groundbreaking technologists with the passing of Peter A. Crean on December 23, 2023.
He died in Rochester, N.Y., simply hours earlier than the dying of Dorothy Crean, his spouse of 55 years.
The holder of a doctorate in nuclear physics from Princeton College, Crean joined Xerox Corp. in 1970 as a scientist on the firm’s analysis heart in Webster, N.Y. Over the following 4 many years, he developed or co-developed lots of the applied sciences that grew to become the constructing blocks of digital printing and imaging because it exists immediately.
In 1970, for instance, he was one among three members of an engineering crew that produced the primary laser printer. Initially of the listing of 40 patents he created for Xerox was the corporate’s first high-quality, high-speed CCD doc scanner. He would go on to make elementary contributions in almost all areas of manufacturing printing and imaging for Xerox, from which he retired in 2010.
The innovations named in Crean’s patents recommend the scope and complexity of his analysis. For instance:
- Hybrid single-pass, multi-pass full coloration printing system
- Strategies to regulate look of gloss ranges for printed textual content and pictures
- Web page parallel raster picture processing
- Minimizing spectrophotometer impression on spot coloration accuracy
- Web page parallel RIP with interleaved chunks
- Pipelined structure for patterned halftone technology
- Inkjet printer droplet top sensing management
Improvements Beneath the Hood
Crean and different Xerox researchers discovered a approach to run imaging and compression algorithms for variable printing on high-performance video chips—an utility that yielded larger print speeds and higher imaging high quality at decrease price. Developments like these underlay the success of Xerox merchandise from the landmark DocuTech 135 Manufacturing Writer to the equally iconic DocuColor iGen3 Digital Manufacturing Press.
“We’re saddened to study concerning the current passing of Dr. Peter A. Crean, who joined Xerox in 1970 and labored as a researcher for over 40 years,” mentioned Justin Capella, a spokesperson for the corporate. “A pioneer of printing know-how, Dr. Crean’s legacy leaves an enduring impression on Xerox.”
“I liked working with him,” recalled Frank Steenburgh, the Xerox gross sales government who led the market launches of the DocuTech and the iGen3. Every time technical questions arose, “he all the time both understood or discovered and received again to me. He may talk. I trusted him.”
A selected present of Crean’s, mentioned Steenburgh, was his potential to translate know-how from the lab into real-world purposes “in a product that was prepared for the market.” He’s remembered at Xerox as one of many first engineers to include gross sales crew and buyer suggestions into the event of recent applied sciences.
After retiring from Xerox as a Senior Analysis Fellow, Crean partnered with Henry Freedman, an skilled in imaging and print sciences, Dr. Peter Dundas, a former principal coloration scientist for Xerox, and Eric Zeise, a analysis scientist for Eastman Kodak, in Know-how Watch–Picture Check Labs, a developer of picture and coloration measurement instruments for print purposes.
There, he was a part of a mission that for the primary time measured the flexibility of digital printing to match, and even exceed, the standard of offset lithography all through a print run. In 2017, the Picture Check Labs crew acquired an InterTech Know-how Award for ImageGrader™, a system that speeds and simplifies the evaluation of picture high quality of offset and digital presses.
A Legacy to Bear in mind
Crean was the 2009 recipient of the Robert F. Reed Know-how Medal from the Technical Affiliation of the Graphic Arts (TAGA). The award acknowledges scientists and engineers who contribute to important enhancements within the graphic communications business.
In response to Freedman, the highest three “elementary sport changers” of Crean’s profession had been the technical improvements he dropped at the event of laser printer, the multifunction printer (MFP), and to what Freedman says was the primary B2-format digital press (a mission for the U.S. Military).
Freedman additionally cites Crean’s pioneering work in accelerating knowledge flows for enhanced press imaging speeds; and devising new methods to measure and talk about coloration printing.
“Above the Normal Individual”
Dundas remembers the facility of Crean’s mind as he pushed the restrict of digital print efficiency at Picture Check Labs.
He was “an individual above the overall particular person,” Dundas mentioned. “In case you knew Pete, you’d be amazed on the measurement of the mind he had. He got here throughout as figuring out every little thing, like an Encyclopedia Britannica with out the e book.”
Freedman believes that Crean’s spirit and accomplishments will be appreciated to this present day in each exposition of digital print know-how the business places on.
“Every thing you see if you stroll throughout that present, he’s inside these bins,” Freedman mentioned.