The tested scans did look kind of crappy, so if you care about non altered glyphs maybe don't do a lossy compression on a low resolution scan. So these issue can totally happen with any printer if your resolution is too low, the glyphs are ambigous and you use a too aggressive lossy compression. This also happens with other approaches like vectorization or OCR.
I already did, although some time ago. Kriesel also has some other interesting talks, e.g. about the German Railway company.
Like I totally think Xerox is at fault, but what they actually did wrong was using bad defaults (and lying when they got told). This can totally occur with any software. From looking at the pictures I think part of the issue was that the input resolution was lower than what the compression was tested with, not the compression part per se.
Also I think the customers are at least partially at fault for digitalizing, but not checking. Don't be stingy on important data. And who in there sane minds throws away the originals????? Like you can throw away copies all the way you like, but NEVER the original. (Except when you really want to "destroy" information.) To me that was the most ridiculous part, assuming software (being famous for bugs like no other tool) can never be wrong and throwing away physical things only relying on your random files to exist.
> I haven't watched the talk since I saw it
Funny statement, sounds like a tautology and still contains information.