Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018 - 29

He made an appointment with the administration, but "they
weren't receptive to the idea at all," he says. "They thought
it was going to be a tough sell." Turns out they were right.
Screen printers weren't known for being a computer-savvy
crowd then. The rendering technology of the day was excruciatingly slow. Traditionalists were inexplicably attached to
their film - and those who were willing to part with it seemed
perfectly content with vellum that rang in at 30 cents a sheet.
But McCue believed in the simplicity of the idea that ink on
paper was not that different from ink on emulsion, and knew
that his concept had the potential to fundamentally rattle the
screen printing workflow.

The ScreenJeT

It was about a year before McCue heard back from Gerber.
They purchased his right to file a patent and hired him on as a
consultant to help with the development of what would come
to be called the ScreenJet.
It was an exciting time; Greaves recalls being flown in to
consult on the early stages of the machine's development: "It
was clearly cobbled together, but holy smoke, the thing actually put down ink on top of the screen. We all oohed and aahed
- and then, of course, we saw about 20 different problems."
The uphill battle McCue had faced in convincing the
company to adopt his idea persisted; the next few years of
development were dotted with disagreements about how the
technology should be implemented.
There was the issue of ink. "It splattered a lot," remembers
Greaves; the stencil wasn't smooth enough; the ink wasn't
opaque enough. Instead of trying different inks, McCue says
they developed an "elaborate powder dusting system," which
led to new problems.
Another roadblock was the software, an Adobe PostScript
emulator that resulted in a loss of accuracy. At the time, there
was no way to preview what the design would look like, so

therefore no way of catching mistakes until the screen was
printed. This later proved to be an enormous challenge in
selling the technology.
McCue had envisioned the machine as a desktop printer
with a direct connection to a computer, just like the day he'd
printed the "Mona Lisa" onto a screen. But that kind of engineering would've been expensive, and Gerber used a floppy
disk drive instead. The problem was that many files were
larger than what a floppy disk could hold. Gerber also planned
to market it as a tabletop unit, without supplying a base. "But
it was a monster," says McCue. "Most people don't have tables
like that just hanging around."
McCue worked on the development for about a year and
then, he says, "I went on my merry way." The ScreenJet
came to market in early 1993, with Gerber citing that it could
produce an exposure-ready screen for a typical T-shirt job
in 4 to 8 minutes. (Others reported that, because high-speed
image processing did not yet exist, it could take as long as 40
minutes.) Resolution was 300 dpi, and it imaged screens up
to 20 x 27 inches. The company targeted garment printers;
Randy Shamber, marketing manager of the day, told Screen
Printing in 1992 that the machine could be economical for
shops producing as few as 15 screens per day.

The cuSTomerS

"Screen printers used to drive me nuts," laughs McCue.
Shortly after the ScreenJet went to market, Screen Printing
Supplies started selling it and McCue found himself championing the technology yet again, this time to his customers. "They
were like, 'You can take the film out of my cold, dead hands.'"
The arguments against adopting the technology ran the
gamut, and McCue thought he had foolproof responses to
every one of them:
We can't give up our film. How will we register on our
presses?

Disruption to a workflow that dated back
decades. Clockwise from upper left: the
painstaking process of knife-cut stencil film;
low-cost vellum allowed printers to produce
their own film positives in house; the
ScreenJet with its control panel and floppy
disk drive visible; a ScreenJet demonstration
at a tradeshow in the early '90s. Courtesy of
Richard Greaves.
december 2017 / january 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Screen Printing - December 2017/January 2018