The Copy Break

The newest fad in U.S. business offices is the copy break -that unguarded moment when clerk or perhaps even vice president slips over to the office copying machine, quietly reproduces everything from old love letters to check stubs. Half a million U.S. offices now have one or more copying machines, which this year will turn out well over 10 billion copies, or 50 for each person in the nation. Last week in Los Angeles, the copying industry demonstrated its wares at the annual exposition of the Business Equipment Manufacturers As sociation -and the large and versatile family of machines on hand showed that an already crowded field is in for some fierce competition.

The business has been growing by 20% a year, is expected to hit $480 million this year. A dozen major manufacturers as diverse as Royal McBee and Eastman Kodak are in it, and many other giants, including IBM, are looking. All of them are trying to copy the sales drive and scientific ingenuity of the far-ahead leader, Xerox Corp., whose earnings for the first nine months of 1964 have risen 59%. Having pioneered an electrostatic process that requires neither special paper nor chemicals, Xerox makes machines that can turn out seven to eight copies a minute at about 31-L- each.

In Los Angeles, Addressograph-Multigraph's Bruning Division showed off two electrostatic models that it claims can produce copies at half the cost and twice the speed of Xerox machines but that require special paper. American Photocopy demonstrated its new "Dial-A-Copy," which has a telephone-like dial on which the user can order from one to ten copies, and SCM (Smith Corona-Marchant) showed its similar, dial-operated Model 44. 3M displayed six specialized machines that produce by means of heat and light sensitivity; one turns out single copies on heat-sensitive paper for about 310, and another produces 40 copies a minute on ordinary paper for about 10 each.

Xerox, which puts 10% of its sales into research, also has some innovations on the way. Perhaps pushed by the competition, it has just demonstrated a highspeed, high-volume machine that will not be marketed until next year-but will produce up to 2,400 copies an hour. The company has also begun to lease its new LDX model, which instantly transmits copies between offices as far as 4,000 miles apart. Perhaps optimistically, Xerox figures that it will continue indefinitely to supply close to half of the nation's copying machines. It can be fairly certain about one thing: the market for copies will grow as fast as the competition. Paper has proliferated so much in U.S. corporations that it costs tens of billions of dollars yearly to handle, $5 billion to file. The temptation to multiply paperwork is so great that those totals are expected to double in the next decade.

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