After a brief history of Canada's fingerprint system development, the paper discusses the impact of 10-print records and latent prints on the criminal justice system. The central system today uses optical disks to process latent and 10-print fingerprints through combined and automated systems. The paper outlines procedures used to process fingerprints and describes the system's equipment and recent upgrades. This new technology has enabled the RCMP to process twice the number of 10-prints and to increase its latent print searching thirteenfold with identification escalating by 2,000 percent, while reducing human resource requirements. An analysis of deficiencies focuses on delays that impede investigations, problems caused by poorly rolled fingerprints, and video images that produce poor quality fingerprint information.