jon@msunix.UUCP (Jonathan Hue) (08/05/87)
Well, I got sent down to SIGGRAPH last week to look for digital scanners and cameras, film recorders, and color printers. Didn't see much in the way of new cameras or film recorders, but I did see a lot of color printers, and hopefully I'll get my information correct this time. So here are the current rankings the way I see it: 1) Tie between IRIS 3024 and Dai Nippon. Both are around $45,000. This is the new IRIS printer. It is 240dpi with 30 grey levels. 30 ink drops are sprayed for each dot, the charged dots land on the paper, the uncharged ones fall into a tray. You can print on almost any media you can get in the thing, including sandpaper! Images look best printed on matte paper, glossy paper tends to soften the edges because the ink doesn't get absorbed and dries slower. The Dai Nippon is 300dpi and around 200 grey levels. It is a thermal printer and uses resin coated paper, so everything is glossy. Though its specs are better than the IRIS, it gets downgraded because it's a thermal printer - even $45,000 can't buy a perfect thermal head or perfect donor rolls, you can still see some blotchiness in solid cyan and magenta. The dots are square, and vary in density to obtain the 200 grey levels. IRIS did not have a booth at SIGGRAPH, just a hospitality suite at the Emerald Hotel. Dai Nippon was showing in the Quantel booth. Also, thanks to the guys from SGI in the lobby of the Emerald who kept saying, "The Iris suite is at the Hilton." IRIS the company boys, not Iris the workstation. 2) Panasonic (unknown model). This was a prototype they had in their booth, no price or ship date was given. I asked the guy how much it was and he said, "Well, since it's the only one, I figure a half a million maybe." 200dpi with 8 dot sizes. It's a thermal printer, with a three color donor roll. They actually get an ok black with just CMY. 3) Tektronix 4693. I knew they would come out with something. Actually they dropped by here a month or so ago with samples. 300dpi, no grey levels or variable dot sizes so specs are the same as the Versatec. Around $8K. It comes with a controller with a 68020, so you can send it RGB data, and it will resize it, convert it to CMYK, and generate the dots. The interesting thing I saw under the loupe was they they grow dots from the outside in, I always grow them from the inside out. This should be great for people who don't want to generate their own dots or do the CMYK conversions. The controller also has enough memory to buffer an entire image, so you can do multiple copies. The Tek printer seems to have fewer defects in the donor roll than the Versatec. 4) Versatec 2700 - old comments apply here. 5) Seiko 5312 - old comments apply here. 6) Tektronix 4696 - I was shown some algorithms which do a better job than a straight ordered dither on this low resolution device. 7) Tektronix 4692 - old comments apply here. As far as scanners go, the Barneyscan was in the AT&T booth. This was at the Chromaset Expo in San Francisco too. It will scan a 35mm slide at up to 3K x 2K and costs around $7000. Unfortunately, it only hooks up to a AT&T Targa board (Vista board in the future). Yup, the Vista board doesn't look too bad. There should be some neat applications running on it in the near future. Jonathan Hue DuPont Design Technologies/Via Visuals leadsv!msunix!jon