The Finishers
What happens after the copy is the point
THE FINISHERS
The machine made the copy; the accessory bay made the document. Sorters, staplers, stitchers, binders and the sainted recirculating feeder — a field guide to the hardware that turned a box into a system. Declared interest: aged thirteen, the editor read the options pages of every brochure first, and has never fully returned.
A photocopier, on its own, is a box that makes copies. A photocopier with its accessory bay filled is a system that makes documents, and the distance between those two sentences is the whole of this feature. Feeder in, engine within, finisher out: input, process, output — a first, accidental lesson in systems thinking, delivered standing beside a warm machine while a report assembled itself. Nobody ever bought the sorter for the productivity figures. They bought it because a machine that hands you finished work has stopped being furniture.
The founding act belongs, improbably, to Kodak. The Ektaprint 100 of 1975 — the photographic giant’s first copier, twelve years in development — arrived with the industry’s first recirculating document feeder, cycling the originals past the platen once per set so that collated, stapled sets emerged with no sorter tower at all. IBM, Xerox and Canon all took licences. One observer said Kodak’s debut was like having the first plane you built be a four-engine jet; the RDF was the part everyone else queued to bolt onto their own aircraft.
But the sorter is where finishing became theatre. Ten or twenty bins on a docked tower, a transport belt running the entry face, one deflector finger per bin flicking each sheet home — page one to every bin, then page two, the bins filling in rotation like a card dealer working a very patient table. Moving-bin types inverted the trick: a helical cam walked the bins themselves past a fixed paper path. Mechanical, noisy, satisfying — the pre-digital collation experience, and the best free show in the office.
The staple sorter completed the argument. A sorted set is a suggestion; a stapled set is a document, and the options list priced commitment accordingly — in 1994 Canon asked US$3,240 for the 20-Bin Stapler Sorter-C1, against $1,515 for the RDF-C1 feeder and $2,705 for the duplexing pedestal. The Stapler Sorter-D2 jogged, sorted and stapled sets of up to 20 sheets across ten bins; Mita’s stapler attachment did the same duty on the DC-6500, 65 copies a minute into finished sets. It was the upgrade that made a copier feel like a colleague: you asked for twenty reports, and it handed you twenty reports.
A field guide to the accessory bay
Terminology first, because the brochures never agreed: a sorter separates, a collator assembles, a finisher commits. Everything below bolted onto the flank of something warm — and Ricoh’s option codes shipped unchanged under five different badges, so much of the decade’s finishing was one finisher, five logos.
Finishing, By Type — 1990–2000
| Type | The move | Sighted in the wild |
|---|---|---|
| Bin sorter | 10 or 20 bins; one deflector, one set each | Everywhere: Ricoh FT-era 10/20-bin units, Sharp and Toshiba mid-range fits |
| Staple sorter | Jogs the set square, staples it in the bin | Canon Stapler Sorter-D2 — 10 bins, 30-page sets, staples to 20 sheets; Mita’s attachment on the DC-6500 |
| Finisher | Offset stacking plus stapling at engine speed | Xerox 1090 (to 50 sheets); Konica FS-102/103 on the 7050; Minolta FN-100/102; Océ 3165 with covers and inserts inline; even DocuPrint printers got “WorkSet” stapling |
| Thermal binder | Adhesive spine, in-line | Xerox 5090 — books of 15 to 125 pages, glued as they pass |
| Stitcher | Wire stitch, single or dual | The 5090 again: 2–70 sheets; DocuTech inherited the whole module |
| Punch & folder | Z-fold, letter fold, drilled sets | Mostly finisher options; Océ’s wide-format folder turned an A0 drawing into an A4 filing miracle |
| Booklet maker | Saddle-stitch, in-line — the dream option | DocuTech — signature imposition decided at the print queue |
Honorary finishers: the feeders
The recirculating document feeder — RDF, later genericised as the RADF — cycles the originals past the platen once per set and inverts two-sided ones, so collated sets emerge with no sorter at all. Kodak invented it on the 1975 Ektaprint 100 and licensed it to IBM, Xerox and Canon: the rare option that reorganised the whole machine around itself. Canon’s RDF-F1 swallowed 100 originals for unattended duplex. Doctrine as stated in our Canon review stands and is not open for correspondence: the reversing feeder is the correct feeder.
PURE JOY — OFFICIAL RATINGS
The hole punch loses marks for chad. The staple sorter and the RDF share the trophy. The booklet maker: we only ever saw one, and we still think about it.