Photocopying in the context of "Electrostatic"

Printing emerged as early as the 4th millennium BCE in the form of cylinder seals used by the Proto-Elamite and Sumerian civilizations to certify documents written on clay tablets. Other early forms include block seals, hammered coinage, pottery imprints, and cloth printing. Initially a method of printing patterns on cloth such as silk, woodblock printing for texts on paper originated in Tang China by the 7th century, to the spread of book production and woodblock printing in other parts of Asia such as Korea and Japan. The Chinese Buddhist Diamond Sutra, printed by woodblock on 11 May 868, is the earliest known printed book with a precise publishing date. Movable type was invented in China during the 11th century by the Song dynasty artisan Bi Sheng, but it received limited use compared to woodblock printing. However, the use of copper movable types was documented in a Song-era book from 1193, and the earliest printed paper money using movable metal type to print the identifying codes were made in 1161. The technology also spread outside China, with the oldest extant printed book using metal movable type being the Jikji, printed in Korea in 1377 during the Goryeo era.

Woodblock printing was also used in Europe until the mid-15th century. Late medieval German inventor Johannes Gutenberg created the first printing press based on previously known mechanical presses and a process for mass-producing metal type. By the end of the 15th century, his invention and widescale circulation of the Gutenberg Bible became responsible for a burgeoning economical book publishing industry spreading globally across Renaissance Europe and eventually among the colonial publishers and printers that emerged in the British American colonies. This industry enabled the communication of ideas and the sharing of knowledge on an unprecedented scale, leading to the global spread of the printing press during the early modern period. Alongside the development of text printing, new and lower-cost methods of image reproduction were developed, including lithography, screen printing and photocopying.

The Photostat machine, or Photostat, was an early projection photocopier created in the decade of the 1900s by the Commercial Camera Company, which became the Photostat Corporation. The "Photostat" name, which was originally a trademark of the company, became genericized, and was often used to refer to similar machines produced by the RetinalGraph Company or to any copy made by any such machine.

A mimeograph machine (the term often being abbreviated to mimeo), sometimes called a stencil duplicator or stencil machine, is a low-cost duplicating machine that works by forcing ink through a stencil onto paper. The process is called mimeography, and a copy made by the process is a mimeograph.

Mimeographs, along with spirit duplicators and hectographs, were common technologies for printing small quantities of a document, as in office work, classroom materials, and church bulletins. For even smaller quantities, up to about five, a typist would use carbon paper. Early fanzines were printed by mimeograph because the machines and supplies were widely available and inexpensive. Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing into the 1970s, photocopying gradually displaced mimeographs, spirit duplicators, and hectographs.

Canon Production Printing, known as Océ until the end of 2019, is a Netherlands-based subset of Canon that develops, manufactures and sells printing and copying hardware and related software. The product line includes office printing and copying machinery, production printers, and wide-format printers for both technical documentation and color display graphics.

The history of Océ as a company can be traced back to 1877, although its printing-related activities did not begin until 1919.

Saddle stitch staplers or simply saddle staplers are bookbinding tools designed to insert staples into the spine (saddle) of folded printed matter such as booklets, catalogues, brochures, and manuals. They are distinguished by the presence of a metal V-shaped hump or "saddle" which is used to precisely align the central fold of the material to be stapled. Manual saddle staplers are generally longer than most traditional staplers, which are too short to staple booklets easily.

A saddle stapler may also be used to staple fabric or other flexible material, as the material is bunched up inside the throat in order to reach the seam to be stapled. Most high-end photocopiers and digital production printers on the market have optional attached saddle stitch units that fold and staple booklets automatically.

In multifunction or all-in-one printers, fax machines, photocopiers and scanners, an automatic document feeder or ADF is a feature which takes several pages and feeds the paper one page at a time into a scanner or copier, allowing the user to scan, and thereby copy, print, or fax, multiple-page documents without having to manually replace each page.

Most copiers allow scanning on the flatbed or platen (the "glass") or through a document feeder. The vast majority of fax machines have an ADF, allowing the unattended sending of multi-page faxes. ADF is so ubiquitous in fax machines that some fax machine owners use the machine as a scanner, faxing multi-page documents to themselves. Document feeders are described by speed, in pages per minute or ppm, and capacity, usually in a range from 10 sheets to 200.