[rly_ItsMe]

In the good old days of analog copiers this would be impossible - the scanner send the light through a system of mirrors to the drum, the drum gets static charged, the toner is pulled on the charged parts and gets transferred to the transfer belt, here the paper has the opposite charge and pulls the toner off of the transfer belt, goes through the fusing unit and here is the toner 'burned' to the paper. End of Story

On a modern copier the scanner transfers the data first to RAM and than usually to a hard disk (the most of the people do not even know that the "copy machine" has one and saves the scanned stuff to it). From that hard disk the data where transmitted via laser to the drum

Tadaaa - you have the reason for having data be compressed on a modern copier.

[blt]

Yup, and those old analog copiers - good ones at least - had beautiful crisp output. The resolution was good enough to reproduce printing dots so they could even duplicate photos from books. Continuous tone of an analog photograph didn't work as well. They sure were expensive though.

[simonster]

I might have missed something, but my reading is that the article doesn't state or imply this happens with regular photocopies, only with scans to PDF.