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A large collection of new images from Scitex (creo) 2004 days has been posted on the Scitex page at Facebook.

To see more, follow this link:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=308919584296#!/group.php?gid=308919584296&v=wall

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Stan Najmir has forwarded this nostalgic photo of The original Brisque Mobile team at Scitex America.
In the picture, from left: Nancy, Mark, Joe, Suzanne, Marc, Leigh.

Stan is currently working at Presstek.

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Peter Havas who  retiered from Scitex last year, has sent us this picture from the recent Ipex 2010 show in Birmingham, UK.
In the pircture you can see the ExScite's, from left to right:
Bipin Dhorajiwala, Phil Cecchini, Shlomo Abraham, Itzhak Stolak, Darren Taylor.

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 A color technician at Widen Graphic, and a long time Scitex system operator Mark Pajari wrote this nice article in his blog. Widen was one of the primary customers of Scitex in America for more than a decade.

Happy Birthday Photoshop!
Friday, February 12, 2010

Adobe Photoshop turns 20 years old this month…. ….Ah, memories. I recall the first time I played with Photoshop. I was a young kid with a dream. Well, okay, I was a 20-something working on a Scitex Prisma workstation. Scitex was what all the cool imaging people were working on in 1990. Then along came this program called Photoshop 1.0 from Adobe. Some of my coworkers at Quad Graphics knew it as a funny program with the creepy bitmapped eyeball icon running on that little beige box called the Macintosh over in the corner. Back then it was not so much of a photo editor as it was a paint program with a few image correction and optimization capabilities. By 1993 I was weened off the Scitex system, and had my own speedy Quadra 950 running Photoshop 2.0. Back then, Photoshop was no replacement for a high-end CEPS system. The Mac, running at a speedy 33MHz, was dreadfully slow (by today's standards), RAM was very limited and expensive, and the tools in Photoshop did not compare to a $200,000 workstation like the Scitex Prismax. What a difference 17 years makes…...Photoshop evolved into the tool it is today because the digital imaging and desktop publishing markets around it flourished at the same time. First it was low-cost desktop scanners, then digital photography. This digital revolution helped define what Photoshop has become today....

To read the complete article, click here.

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Seventy former employees of the Scitex mechanical plants met in early June.

The ExScite Tambar Bitov has Emailed us a link to a photo album which has been uploaded after the very ExScite'ing meeting .
To check it out, click here: http://picasaweb.google.com/ornahe/2010?feat=email#. This is only a start, and it is expected that more pictures will be added later to this Album on the Web.

Tamar wrote us that she keeps an updated distribution list and anyone that has spent some time in the Mechanical plant, is invited to contact her at: http://exscite.net/n-member-info.asp?CONTACTID=7607.
Added Tamar:
"A lot of people said that they left  with a taste for more, so we'll probably have additional similar events  in the future. We've also opened a group on facebook (in Hebrew). If anybody is interested, he/she is invited to join".

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Scitex: A Company At A Crossroads
Published at the Journal of Business Case Studies

We have stumbled upon an interesting case study (circa 2006) on the Web.The 12 pages study makes an interesting reading for ExScite's. To see the the complete case study as PDF file, click here: http://www.cluteinstitute-onlinejournals.com/PDFs/200615.pdf

Scitex is one of the first Israeli high tech firms that succeeded internationally and it was an Israeli pioneer regarding the floatation of the firm on NASDEQ. Scitex made an international name for itself in the 1980’s by selling prepress systems to major publishers worldwide. The prepress system developed by Scitex allowed printers to prepare material for print in a digital way, thereby expanding printing options and allowing accurate printing of color pictures. While Scitex was very successful during the late 1980’s and the beginning of the 1990’s, its financial ratios had declined during the 1990’s and stockholders has shown their dissatisfaction. During the 1990’s, Israel had become a leading force in the high-tech world; the country had become part of the “New Economy” in which “Exposing Value” was the motto.
The study
Journal of Business Case Studies – Second Quarter 2006 Volume 2, Number 2 Scitex: A Company At A Crossroads By a team headed by Dr. Tamar Almor, (Email: talmor@colman.ac.il), College of Management, Israel.
The case study allows for a SBU analysis of the core unit, as well as an analysis of the corporate strategy and portfolio management of the company. It allows students to discuss the different strategic options open to management and recommend one of them. The case study is suitable for MBA students who study business strategy, corporate strategy, or international business.

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We've found this 4/2009 post on a blog page on the Web:

I wonder where all that old Scitex equipment ever got off to anyway?

"…..When I first got into prepress (1985) it was a very different world. Images came from enormous drum scanners (like Hell Scanners) that spun medium and large format professional transparencies at very high speed on very expensive glass drums around high end scanner heads, and good scanner operators knew their CMYK values for various colors like neutral gray and (theoretical) flesh tones like the back of their hand. Color correction was a time consuming process, and scans had to be top notch right off the scanner…...

….But a new and very expensive technology had come to town: Scitex, an Israeli company who's logo was intended to be a high tech representation of two hands folded in prayer. Today the Scitex name is barely even spoken in the printing world, but from the mid Eighties to the mid Nineties Scitex reigned supreme in the world of prepress. Suddenly, you could handle your color correction and image retouching electronically, removing much of the necessity for film while producing a far superior product. I remember an old prepress veteran at that time remarking that you used to be able to look at hand retouched printing and say, "Wow, that's very nice retouching," but you could still tell it was retouched even if it was done very well. Now with Scitex you couldn't even tell it had been retouched if it was done well. And that changed everything…."

Then one day an announcement was made: "By this time next year we will be completely Macintosh. If you want to have a job this time next year, make the switch.

...I couldn't believe it. Moreover, I thought it a considerable business mistake. But I started making the switch. And once I did I was surprised. The computing ability of the Mac had indeed become equivalent to or better than Scitex was…."

For the full article, press here <http://fireofgodimaging.blogspot.com/2009/04/scitex.html>

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The picture below was taken at a Christmas Party in Brussels, probably around 1990.
Ernst Hofmann (Ex-STE sales, Munich), the young person sitting on left side of the table, sent us this picture.

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Ah… Seychelles…this lovely family pictures was taken around 1990 on the islands.
The picture was sent to us by the ExScite Ernst Hofmann, who had been a sales manager at STE in Germany for many years. The picture was taken during the annual trip of the best STE sales people, the "centurion club" to the Seychelles.

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Your color solution:
One workstation, providing cost-effective page assembly and color retouching.

A Scitex Prisma "do-all" workstation brochures from the middle 80's. The brochure had been scanned and uploaded by the ExScite Jenine Simmons.