This report originally appeared in the July 2009 issue of DOTmed Business News

Remember the Energizer Bunny? When it comes to the laser camera industry, it's sort of the same idea; it keeps going and going and going. Just when everyone in the medical industry was ready to write-off laser cameras as an obsolete technology, it is showing that it still has some legs-both on the new and refurbished market.

Everyone knows that digital technology has engulfed just about every area in the medical industry, and it seemed like it would be the force that made the laser cameras extinct. In fact, just one or two years ago people were predicting that laser cameras would be obsolete by around 2012, but because of the way the economy has turned, those estimates have been pushed back at least another decade.
"Because of the situation of the economy, customers are turning back to alternatives to their imaging solutions, as opposed to two years ago when everyone wanted to go digital," says Carols Cooper, an engineer at Florida-based Managed Medical Imaging. "As a result of that, I think there's still a long way to go before customers make that transition. It could be from 7-10 years for everyone to make that conversion. In the meantime, lasers are around and they will continue to be."

Not that there haven't been drastic changes since the early 1980s when wet processing was all that was available. Over the past decade, wet chemicals have become virtually non-existent in laser cameras, as dry and thermal processing became the norm. The original wet cameras became expensive because of the cost in base materials of silver and petroleum, in addition to the devices being cumbersome and problems with chemical storage.




"Early versions were all wet but those devices are mostly gone. Today, everyone uses a dry camera in a central location," says David Denholtz, CEO of Integrity Medical Systems, Inc. You send all your images to that-MRI film, CT, ultrasound- whatever you have connected to it. It's sort of like a networked laser printer in your office."

And those dry cameras now use Teflon, as opposed to the rubber heat drums, which allows a printer to go through around 200,000 sheets before needing replacements.

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