FORMER CROSFIELD MD PASSES AWAY

Jim Salmon, who led world-renowned Crosfield Electronics through its halcyon era in the 1970s and '80s, has passed away, aged 84.

Under Salmon’s leadership UK-based Crosfield became on the of big four electronic page make-up systems developers, along with Hell, Scitex and Screen, who transformed prepress from laborious time intensive manual activity into a fast, automated, digital process.

Crosfield technology was particularly popular in Australia and New Zealand, with trade houses and the bigger printers regularly ordering it, and spending on the stand at Ipex and drupa in large numbers.

Ultimately Crosfield and its rivals were undone by the Apple Mac and the Aldus page make up system, which could essentially do the same task, albeit without the sophistication, but for a tiny fraction of the price – the Crosfield systems, and their rivals, were costing well over $1m.

Crosfield was founded by John Crosfield in 1947, and under Salmon’s leadership it became one of the UK’s major technology export success stories, in fact Salmon received an OBE from the Queen for his work.

Crosfield was eventually sold to a Du Pont Fuji venture in 1989, with Salmon retiring three years later. Of the others Scitex founder Efi Arazi sold to Creo, which was itself bought by Kodak, while Arazi founded EFI. Hell was bought by Linotype, and that operation was then bought by Heidelberg. Of the big four only Screen remains in its original form.