Photo Starter

"I don't tinker with anything if I can help it," says Boston's William W. Garth Jr., an M.I.T.-trained entrepreneur who likes to think up new products in printing technology and hire engineers to build them. In 1967 he observed that while large city newspapers had the money to invest in modern phototypesetting machines that cost roughly $30,000 each, smaller daily and weekly papers were still struggling with old-fashioned Linotype machines that were four tunes slower and far costlier to operate. So he instructed the engineers at his Compugraphic Corp. to develop a small, stripped-down phototypesetting machine that he could sell to small dailies and weeklies for no more than $10,000. Today Compugraphic is the nation's largest manufacturer of phototypesetting equipment, big and small alike. The company has a 40% share of the market and last year recorded worldwide sales of $47 million.

In this inexpensive phototypesetting process, character images on a film strip are projected directly onto photographic paper that is then converted into a printing plate. Garth, now 59, first worked on the process in the 1950s, when he was president of Photon, Inc. After a corporate squabble, he left the firm in 1960, took his chief engineer with him, and set up Compugraphic. His first successful product was a computer designed to cut 50% off the time required to set a telephone book in type; Garth introduced it by driving it round the country in the back of his station wagon. Now that he has largely sewed up the market for photocomposition machines in newspapers, his next goal is to sell equipment to job shops, department stores and schools that do printing.

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