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Path: utzoo!watmath!watnot!watcgl!onfcanim!dave
From: dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Newsgroups: net.graphics
Subject: Re: Funding/Sponsors need for graphics project
Message-ID: <14918@onfcanim.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 12-Sep-86 14:42:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: onfcanim.14918
Posted: Fri Sep 12 14:42:33 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 13-Sep-86 04:56:18 EDT
References: <136@ndmath.uucp> <265@msunix.UUCP>
Reply-To: dave@onfcanim.UUCP (Dave Martindale)
Organization: National Film Board / Office national du film, Montreal
Lines: 49
Summary: 

I'd like to expand a bit on Johnathan's well-made points:

In article <265@msunix.UUCP> jon@msunix.UUCP (Jonathan Hue) writes:

>In article <136@ndmath.uucp>, milo@ndmath.uucp (Greg Corson) writes:
>> I am currently seeking funding for a project who's eventual object is to 
>> produce an artists/photographers computer workstation.  The goal of the 
>> project is to create a workstation with the capabilities of color painting,
>> digitized image editing/retouching and compositing of high resolution images.
>> Another major goal is to attempt to keep the price down through the use of
>> stock microcomputers (ie: AT's with frame buffers, Sun workstations or something
>> similar).
>
>But you're going
>to need a *lot* more resolution for output.  I think Dicomed and Geni put
>out 8K by 8K to their film recorders.  It's easy for them because they are
>vector systems.  You need a minimum of 2K resolution, anti-aliased
>for good looking slides.  TV requirements are way lower, about 656 x 485
>for NTSC encoded RGB.  For retouching photos for prepress, you're going
>to need 1000 dots per inch, or 8500 x 11000 for a full page, or over 240
>megabytes for full color, full page picture.  And that's a raster system,
>not a vector system.
>

The original poster is concerned with making the system cheap by using
stock microcomputers.  That *isn't* where the cost is.  If you're going
to be producing high-quality slides, and thus using a high-resolution
CRT-based film recorder, the output hardware will cost you anywhere
from about $25K (US) for a Matrix QCR, up to well above $100K for a
Dicomed or Celco, the fastest and sharpest of the film recorders.

If you want to do input at video resolution, you just need a good
video camera and a frame grabber.  But to work at 2048 or 4096 pixels,
about the only thing available is an Eikonix scanner that will cost you
at least $30K.

> If you want
>to see some intense picture retouching at about 8.5K x 11K, full color,
>check out a Scitex Response 300 system, made in Israel.  About $500K.

To get the resolution that you need for doing publishing-type work, and
writing onto the large pieces of film used to make printing plates,
none of the above-mentioned hardware is good enough.  The Scitex system
uses a large rotating-drum laser scanner for its output device, and I
believe uses another similar mechanism for input.  Regardless of what
computer hardware is used in the Scitex system, those scanners are
going to be a large chunk of the cost.

	Dave Martindale