Time flies, and this year marks 25 years of Japanese prepress and digital printing manufacturer Dainippon Screen in Australia, writes Peter Coleman.

Others of the ‘golden age’ when scanner operators commanded higher salaries than their bosses, have gone. Though the intellectual property survives, Linotype-Hell (bought by Heidelberg), Scitex (merged into Creo and then Kodak) and Crosfield (parts of which remain in Fujifilm) are now names from history.

The $3 billion revenue Kyoto-based manufacturer – and its Australian subsidiary – has survived by adapting, first by responding to the introduction of desktop publishing and then with new product lines and technologies.

In November 1987, one of my first jobs as a graphic arts journalist was to mark the transition as Screen took its distribution agency over from Edwards Dunlop Graphics, who left equipment sales to focus on paper.

My enduring memory is of security staff playing cards to pass the time in the former EDG premises, while the new Japanese managing director fielded service calls and customer enquiries singlehanded. Happily, the reliability of the Screen equipment meant there were few technical problems to solve.

Dainippon Screen in Australia has continued from there: “Some of the staff from EDG came over to the new direct operation and are still with us to this very day,” says managing director Peter Scott. “We have also enjoyed a very loyal customer base who have stayed with us through major technology shifts from film and scanners through to CTP and digital printing.”

Screen Japan is listed on the Nikkei 200 stock index and has just released its annual report showing a positive result for its media and precision technology division, with both sales and profits increasing during the 2011-12 financial year.

Its primary products in the newspaper segment are platesetters, workflow software and inkjet digital printing systems. At DRUPA, it introduced or previewed new products including a new digital label press, a new high-productivity wide format flatbed UV machine, faster and greener CTP systems and a packaging version of its Truepress Jet SX B2 digital press.

Screen also operates in the semiconductor, flat panel display and green energy fields and is by far the world’s major supplier of critical silicon wafer-cleaning equipment that is essential in semiconductor manufacture.