Jochimsen and Surprise were joined in founding Iris by John Oberteuffer and Richard Santos after being introduced by the U.S. licensing agent for Professor Hertz' inkjet patents, Arthur D. Little of Lexington, Massachusetts.
A smaller model, 3024, which supported automatic handling of 11" × 17" (279 × 432 mm) paper, was introduced at the September 1987 "Lasers in Graphics" show in Miami.
Such prepress output devices are used to check the image and for critical color match on industrial printing jobs such as commercial product packaging and magazine layout.
Iris printers use a continuous flow ink system to produce continuous-tone dot free output.
[1] Iris printers have also been used since the late 1980s as final output digital printing devices in the production of fine art reproductions on various media, including paper, canvas, silk, linen and other textiles.
[2] There were many problems with adapting the Iris printer to fine art printing including modifying the machines to take heavy paper stock and dealing with the poorly fade-resistant (fugitive) nature of the inks.