When they see their children's drawings replicated in brilliant colour in the pages of the school newsletter, parents are surprised and delighted to see their children's creations. The school's phone lines were soon jammed with mothers calling to express their thanks. All of these creations, and many more, were created using the DiALTA Color CF2001. A few months ago in an effort to maximise the CF2001's wide range of printing and scanning features, Noda Seika Kindergarten purchased the printer controller option called Fiery X3e. With Fiery X3e, scanned pictures and photos can be transferred quickly and easily to a PC, or transferred from a PC to the CF2001 for colour printing. Image data stored on a PC can also be edited and processed, adding new creative dimensions to the school's colour document productions. With the introduction of Fiery X3e, the kindergarten began relying on the CF2001 more than ever, producing not only school newsletters but a wide assortment of educational materials. The result is an ever-expanding library of valuable educational resources, all beautifully reproduced in full colour. Recently Noda Seika put on a puppet play called The Jumping Banana. All materials produced for this event were printed in colour for distribution to each class. In the past, a single item, like a picture of a banana, would have had to have been shared among all classes. Today each class gets its own bright, yellow banana. Thanks to the CF2001, the teachers are spared the painstaking task of colouring and pasting papers, which in turn reduces the workload and boosts efficiency.

Noda Seika now prints out virtually all of its newsletters, teaching materials and documents on the CF2001. "The colour printing is real fast," exclaims Mr. Yoshioka. "It's much faster than other types of machines, and much faster than an ink jet printer. And it's so easy to use, that we print just about all our documents on the CF2001." Seika also uses the CF2001 for scanning children's drawings and photos of school events. Now every issue of the school newsletter includes photos, and parents are impressed. When they see photos of their children's faces in the newsletter, parents call the school straightaway to thank them. "When I hear the joy in the mothers' and fathers' voices, I'm really glad we decided to go with this colour copier," says Mr. Yoshioka happily.

"It's really fast at scanning photos. Other scanners I've used were so slow at scanning large pictures and photos that I sometimes thought they had stopped halfway through. The CF2001 seems to be a dozen times faster."

Mr. Yoshioka is really pleased with the boost in speed the CF2001 has provided for the school's office work too. Thanks to the faster processing speed of the copier, the school's work efficiency is much improved, so that now teachers can devote more time to teaching and creative thinking.

When we showed the newly developed DiMAGE X digital camera to the teachers in charge of purchasing, they were keenly interested. And our timing couldn't have been better, as they were teaching a drawing class at the time. The teachers started taking pictures of the class with the DiMAGE X. As they moved around the room looking for the best angles to shoot from, the teachers especially appreciated the ability to delete pictures they didn't like. After the photo shoot was over, we showed the teachers how they could import image files directly into a PC, then add them to documents using ordinary word-processing software. The next edition of the newsletter was finished in no time flat. Total time from production to printout: Just 20 minutes. The teachers were amazed at how easily they could produce professional-looking documents by linking a digital camera, a PC and the CF2001.

Mr. Yoshioka added some comments of his own. "The teachers who handle production of documents often talk about how much fun it is producing the newsletter in colour. With teaching materials as well, the range of possibilities has expanded enormously. And now, with the introduction of Fiery X3e, we can do things we could never do before. The whole process is faster, too, so we try our hand at a wide variety of design and layout ideas. The best thing of all is that the documents look so much nicer. I want to get as many teachers as possible involved in producing these colour documents."