Dicomed

» see dicomed.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

A Dicomed was never a thing a person owned. The customer list was national laboratories and the pre-press houses of the advertising business, and the machines were priced accordingly. It was finished in 1999, a year I spent as a teenager in Turkey with no reason ever to have heard of it. It belongs here anyway, because for thirty years Dicomed solved a problem that has quietly ceased to exist: getting an image out of a computer and onto film.

It was incorporated in Minneapolis on 23 December 1968, and the first job was the other direction entirely. Dicomed scanned X-ray films and digitized them, then processed the data to pull contrast out of it and put the result back on a screen. The screen was the D30, built around a dark-trace CRT at 1024 by 1024, and the reason for that choice is a good window on the era. A dark-trace tube writes onto a scotophor layer that holds the image until you clear it with heat, so the D30 needed no frame buffer at all, in years when memory enough to hold a megapixel was priced like jewelry.

The recorder came next and it is what the name meant afterward. The D47 Color Image Recorder arrived in 1971 as the first commercial high-resolution color film recorder for digital imagery, and the company's own chronology credits it with NASA's planetary pictures. That chronology is looser than it looks, mind: it says Saturn and Mars, and 1971 is Mariner 9 at Mars, with no spacecraft due at Saturn for another eight years. The rest of the customer list reads the same way, the national laboratories alongside the intelligence agencies, most running Cray machines big enough to compute color at 4096 by 4096 and none with any other way to look at it.

~ the record ~

~ the recorder ~

Lawrence Livermore is where the color machine came from, and the lab says so itself. In a 1995 oral history, Raymond DeSaussure of Livermore is asked about the important acquisitions and answers that the most important was the Dicomed, a new film recorder, and that "we put them into business." He describes buying one and then working directly with the company on designing the original, down to sourcing the Nikkor lens for it. The competition, he says, was Information International, who would not be as flexible, and the Dicomed was quite a bit less costly.

Judson Rosebush's history of computer animation picks up the thread with the serial numbers. The first color camera you could buy, he writes, was built by Dicomed at the insistence of Steve Levine at Livermore. It worked at four thousand pixels square and handled colored vectors as well as raster. Serial number two ended up at the New York Institute of Technology. Serial number three became the Digital Effects machine in New York. The D48 that followed in 1977 wrote a 4096 by 4096 raster with vector addressability of 32,768 points square, onto film from 16mm up to 105. The D148 that carried the eighties was the trade's byword for the best output money could get, and in 1988 it was redesigned and relaunched as the Captivator 16k.

~ how it landed ~

In 1976 Dicomed turned the technology toward offices. The pivot was a system for making word and title slides, and in 1977 the company opened what it called the world's first computer-generated slide service, which is a sentence that needs translating now. A 35mm slide was how a decision got made in a corporation for about twenty-five years, and until Dicomed the way to get one was to have an artist draw it and a photographer shoot it. Each slide had previously needed both of them; now it needed neither. What followed came fast. The Dicomedia II Slidesystem landed in 1981 and Micromedia put business graphics on an Apple II the year after, and by 1984 PresenterPC was pushing output at eight thousand lines.

~ the camera ~

In the mid-nineties Dicomed went after image capture instead, and it placed two bets. The first was a scanning back for a 4x5 studio camera, launched at the PMA show in Atlanta in 1994 at 6000 by 7520 pixels and twenty thousand dollars, which is forty-five megapixels at a time when consumer digital cameras did not meaningfully exist. The second was the BigShot, an instant-capture back built on a six-centimeter Loral Fairchild sensor of 4096 by 4096, a chip originally made for looking down from satellites, which Dicomed held exclusively under a twenty-seven million dollar development deal funded by its part-owner ITOCHU. The monochrome BigShot shipped at thirty-five thousand dollars.

The scanning back was not Dicomed's design. Michael Collette had founded Better Light in California in early 1992 and built the first professional scanning insert for 4x5 view cameras the following year around a new Kodak trilinear CCD, and he held the patent. In 1994 he licensed it to Dicomed under an exclusive sales and marketing agreement, and better than 750 of them went out with the Dicomed name on the front, to commercial photographers shooting catalog work and to reprographic houses scanning paintings for lithography. Dicomed's chief executive, Trevor Haworth, said in 1996 that the new products signaled the death of conventional film inside ten years. He was right about film.

~ what got buried with it ~

The job worth remembering happened in 1984. Contributors to The Magic Egg, a fifteen-minute IMAX picture assembled from the work of around twenty computer graphics labs, computed their frames and mailed the tapes to Cal Kirchhof in Minneapolis, who exposed them with an IMAX camera bolted to a Dicomed recorder. Paul Heckbert's account of the production notes the deadline behind the deadline: filming could run to late May, after which the IMAX camera had to come off the Dicomed and ship to the South Pacific for another job. It premiered on 22 July 1984 at the Omni Theater in Saint Paul during SIGGRAPH.

Then the reason to exist evaporated. Film recorders existed because the only way to see a computer image at full quality was to expose it onto emulsion, and once pre-press and proofing went digital there was nothing left for the machine to do. Dicomed stopped selling in early 1999. In May the camera technology went to Sienna Imaging of Colorado, along with the development team and the right to use the Dicomed name, and Gretag swallowed Sienna within a year. In December, Better Light took over support and repair for every scanning camera Dicomed had shipped, and then bought the entire stock of spare parts. The Minnesota register records the intent to dissolve on 30 November 2000 and the dissolution on 28 March 2001.

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