Xerox vs. Photocopy

Main Difference

The main difference between Xerox and Photocopy is that the Xerox is a American document management corporation and Photocopy is a device for reproducing documents.

• Xerox

  Xerox Corporation (; also known as Xerox) is an American global corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from Stamford, Connecticut in October 2007), though its largest population of employees is based around Rochester, New York, the area in which the company was founded. The company purchased Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4 billion in early 2010. As a large developed company, it is consistently placed in the list of Fortune 500 companies.On December 31, 2016, Xerox separated its business process service operations, essentially those operations acquired with the purchase of Affiliated Computer Services, into a new publicly traded company, Conduent. Xerox focuses on its document technology and document outsourcing business, and continues to trade on the NYSE.

  Researchers at Xerox and its Palo Alto Research Center invented several important elements of personal computing, such as the desktop metaphor GUI, the computer mouse and desktop computing. These concepts were frowned upon by the then board of directors, who ordered the Xerox engineers to share them with Apple technicians. The concepts were adopted by Apple and later Microsoft. With the help of these innovations, Apple and Microsoft came to dominate the personal computing revolution of the 1980s. Xerox did release the 6085 desktop publishing system in 1986 (before IBM and Microsoft), but an inferior operating system, obsolete hard drive (a 20mb drive weighed over forty pounds), and weak software (documents paginated at one per second), doomed the model, as Apple and Microsoft’s hardware and OS software offered much greater functionality. Xerox also released a 4045 desktop laser printer whose cartridges could print 50,000 pages (instead of 5,000), but the model never caught on, and Xerox abandoned future efforts to focus more on its core businesses.

• Photocopy

  A ‘photocopier’ (also known as a copier or copy machine) is a machine that makes paper copies of documents and other visual images quickly and cheaply. Most current photocopiers use a technology called xerography, a dry process that uses electrostatic charges on a light-sensitive photoreceptor to first attract and then transfer toner particles (a powder) onto paper in the form of an image. Heat, pressure or a combination of both is then used to fuse the toner onto the paper. (Copiers can also use other technologies such as ink jet, but xerography is standard for office copying.) Earlier versions included the Gestetner stencil duplicator, invented by David Gestetner in 1881.

  Commercial xerographic office photocopying was introduced by Xerox in 1959, and it gradually replaced copies made by Verifax, Photostat, carbon paper, mimeograph machines, and other duplicating machines.

  Photocopying is widely used in the business, education, and government sectors. While there have been predictions that photocopiers will eventually become obsolete as information workers increase their use of digital document creation, storage and distribution, and rely less on distributing actual pieces of paper, as of 2015, photocopiers continue to be widely used. In the 2010s, there is a convergence in some high-end machines between the roles of a photocopier, a fax machine, a scanner, and a computer network-connected printer into a multi-function printer. Lower-end machines that can copy and print in color have increasingly dominated the home-office market as their prices fell steadily through 2017. Higher-end color photocopiers capable of handling heavy duty cycles and large-format printing remain a costlier specialty for print and design shops.