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Can Widecom re-invent itself?

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A Blast from the Past!

The Widecom Group Inc began in June 1990 when it was incorporated in Ontario, Canada, with Raja S Tuli, 24, as president and CEO and his brother Suneet S Tuli, 22, as executive VP. Like many projects begun with youthful enthusiasm and ambition, everything seemed possible then.

Raja Tuli had received a BSc in Computer Engineering from the University of Alberta in 1988. His brother graduated two years later with a BSc in Civil Engineering from the University of Toronto. The Tulis were nothing if not massively ambitious. Not content with just wide format scanners, they planned to develop a range of large format devices, including scanners, inkjet printers, copiers and fax machines.

The Tulis wasted no time in building the WideFax, a 24" wide format facsimile machine for technical drawings. It used technology similar to small format faxes but several times bigger. By taking the small format office fax machine and applying it as a single line of contact sensors for scanning large format drawings, the Tulis pioneered a new method of wide format scanning which they called SLC (Single Line Contact) scanning technology. It was to be at the heart of the future Widecom SLC scanner range.

Widecom SLC 436 Large Format Scanner
Early Widecom SLC 436 Large Format Scanner
Photo credit: The Widecom Group Inc.

In April 1991, under a headline that proclaimed "The World's Biggest Fax Machine", FORTUNE Magazine wrote: "Not everything in the world of communications is getting smaller. The Guinness Book of Records has just acknowledged the WideFax facsimile machine as the world's largest. It can transmit blueprints, engineering drawings, and other oversize documents up to 24 inches wide, vs. 8 1/2 inches for standard faxes.

"Developed by WideCom in Mississauga, Ontario, it's portable. You can take it to, say, construction sites for faxing blueprints to home base. If you're sending to a standard-size machine, the WideFax can reduce the drawing or send it in three 8" wide strips for paste-up at the other end. It is also a versatile copier that prints onto a large variety of materials, from erasable fax paper to thermal Mylar. Users can even choose which part of a document they want to enlarge. Price: about $14,000." Widecom was up and running.

By 1992, Widecom's WideFax offered a 36" scanning capability linked to a 36" wide thermal printer. It also had a built-in 14.4Kbaud modem, a telephone-type keyboard and CCITT Group 3 fax compatibility. One year later, Widecom made the WideFax's scanner component available as the standalone 36", 400 dpi optical SLC436 wide format monochrome scanner. Widecom was now in the large format scanner business.

The SLC436 used SLC imaging, a proprietary PC interface, Windows software and a TWAIN driver. The first SLC436s still had all the WideFax's phone buttons. Threshold settings had to be entered manually on the scanner's keyboard. At 400 dpi this monochrome scanner's scan speed of 2ips was comparatively fast with "impressively high" scan quality according to one industry veteran who remembers it.

Most significantly, the Widecom SLC436 cost considerably less than similarly specified large format scanners. Aggressive pricing would be key to Widecom's marketing of all its wide format products. However, low-cost pricing would be a double-edged sword. It would attract new and unskilled resellers eager to undercut established brand names while scaring off experienced resellers keen to add value to an expensive product. The latter would damn the Widecom range by claiming "you get what you pay for".

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