Xerox Confirms To David Kriesel Number Mangling Occuring On Factory Settings

An anonymous reader writes with a followup to last week's report that certain Xerox scanners and copiers could alter numbers as they scanned documents: "In the second Xerox press statement, Rick Dastin, Vice President at Xerox Corporation, stated: 'You will not see a character substitution issue when scanning with the factory default settings.' In contrast, David Kriesel, who brought up the issue in the first place, was able to replicate the issue with the very same factory settings. This might be a serious problem now. Not only does the problem occur using default settings and everyone may be affected, additionally, their press statements may have misled customers. Xerox replicated the issue by following Kriesel's instructions, later confirming it to Kriesel. Whole image segments seem to be copied around the scanned data. There is also a new Xerox statement out now." Swapping numbers while copying may seem like bizarre behavior for a copier, but In comments on the previous posting, several readers pointed out that Xerox was aware of the problem, and acknowledged it in the machine's documentation; the software updates promised should be welcome news to anyone who expects a copier to faithfully reproduce important numbers.

Comments

Re:Sucky thing about digital

[Gaygirlie]

Copying is still high quality.

Incorrect. The way these Xerox - machines work is that they first scan the document, then compress it and store it on the storage medium, and then use that compressed file to print out the copy from. It's braindead.

Re: Do you work for Xerox?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a Xerox technician.

Yes, some models store and compress jobs before printing.

Re:My reaction:

[squiggleslash]

It's the scanner bit. Basically it applies a heavy amount of compression to the final result by looking for blocks that match and duplicating them. Which is all fine until the copier sees what it thinks is a 0 but is actually an 8.