Other
products By Mr. Bob Gumbinner
About
1965, Kenichi (Ken) Shimazu was hired. He developed a paper plate
with a rose bengal sensitized zinc oxide coating which could be
imaged by the Xerox electrostatic process. By using a ferricyanide
solution, copes could be run on an offset press. We installed a
coater to make these plates in a room attached to the stencil coating
section of 2 Ashburton. Kenichi also worked on making films for
proofing using the fotomer negative sensitizer and the pyrogallol
acetone positive sensitizer with dyes which matched the basic
printing ink colors, cyan, magenta, and yellow. A small room was
enclosed in the 137 Alexander Street building to apply these to a
polyester base.
KS note: For a long time I was managing the Specialty Product Laboratory, a catch all description of what my group was doing which is everything outside of main products. Jay Patel joined me in getting most of the things done like the electrostatic master paper and Chrome Guide Color proofing system. During Rhone Poulanc participation, Jay worked on the OPC-A and after the DIC take over worked on OPC-B which lead to the use in Wall Street Journal resulting in eventual Intertech Awards for the technology. Jay was also the main force behind the success of CTX in the field. Later with the help of My Nguyen we produced Quantum 830, the preheat thermal in direct competition agains the then leading Kodak Thermal 830. Since the focus of the group was non-main line products, our effort could not end just developing products, we by necessity needed to collect market info, do scale up in the plant and even run initial production, field test the products and promote the products at the customer level. Polychrome was a small company but our group worked almost like a small company within the company and we all had fun doing it as we were able to learn wide variety of tasks necessary for making a laboratory curiosity into a successful products
I was pretty lucky in that the initial non-main products I was involved in eventually became major products for Polychrome.
KS note: For a long time I was managing the Specialty Product Laboratory, a catch all description of what my group was doing which is everything outside of main products. Jay Patel joined me in getting most of the things done like the electrostatic master paper and Chrome Guide Color proofing system. During Rhone Poulanc participation, Jay worked on the OPC-A and after the DIC take over worked on OPC-B which lead to the use in Wall Street Journal resulting in eventual Intertech Awards for the technology. Jay was also the main force behind the success of CTX in the field. Later with the help of My Nguyen we produced Quantum 830, the preheat thermal in direct competition agains the then leading Kodak Thermal 830. Since the focus of the group was non-main line products, our effort could not end just developing products, we by necessity needed to collect market info, do scale up in the plant and even run initial production, field test the products and promote the products at the customer level. Polychrome was a small company but our group worked almost like a small company within the company and we all had fun doing it as we were able to learn wide variety of tasks necessary for making a laboratory curiosity into a successful products
I was pretty lucky in that the initial non-main products I was involved in eventually became major products for Polychrome.