Digital Imaging- show your early work.

[Sonnar Brian]

We've had a lot of film vs digital discussions, longevity of each, which is better.

This thread is not for that.

Digital is relatively new, and has evolved very quickly in the last 35 years.

This thread is to put up your early work with digital. Might be interesting to see the roots, and how far it has come. I searched the basement for some early representations of work done with the Navy in the early 1980s.

We made our own 2-color, 32x512 Infrared Imager, 12-bits per sample. Mid-wave and Long-wave, so it reached into the thermal. It used 7-track reel-to-reel computer tape for storage. Fed the images into a mainframe Supercomputer, and displayed the data like this:

No date on it, but probably 1982. This graph shows one channel, both the mid-wave and long-wave. Recorded to Ektachrome using a DICOMED film recorder.

Got 16 channels like that. I also produced "carpet plots", 3-D graphs. Later we bought a $100K image processor, a Deanza IP8500. It displayed 512x512 images, 8-bits per channel, RGB. I had a film recorder for it, too. 8x10 Polaroid, 35mm, and 16-mm Bolex.

 

[Chris101]

Cool Brian! I did get into computer imaging briefly. In contrast to your scientific work Brian, mine was all artsy. Mostly in 1987. If the files even exist anymore - they are locked into 5.25 floppy purgatory. But I made prints:

​

See more here. What I find a bit depressing is that I haven't gotten any better. In fact, I've gotten ...

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Cool, Chris.

I still have a 5.25" drive running on my Win 95B machine.

 

[dfoo]

The real question is whether you have any 8" drives 😉

 

[Sonnar Brian]

Hard sectored or Soft-sectored?

I'm looking at an empty Box of Dysan DSDD 8" floppies. "Dysan warrants that each Diskette will be free from defects in title, materials and manufactiring workmanship for the lifetime of the purchaser first using such diskettes".

I gave the 8" drives away, with a Xerox 8/16. The last time i used one was with a Vax 11/780, the Boot Disk. Never used one for home, or for work besides the boot disk.

 

[dfoo]

Yeah, I last used an 8" drive back in the late 80's early 90's on some Vax. I can't remember what we used the disk for. A bank I worked at used 8" disks in their ABM's.

 

[RichC]

My first digital camera - in fact, my first camera EVER - was a FujiFilm FinePix 4700Z I bought new in 2000.

This compact camera had a 2.4 MP sensor, and cost me £600 (about $1000). Just had a quick look on eBay: one in good condition, boxed with all accessories, sold recently for £5!

I wasn't into photography then, and just took snaps. Here's one I took in the summer of 200, in Brittany, France:

 

[Sonnar Brian]

I just checked out my Olympus EP2, converted to "visible+near infrared". Total cost, with the conversion, 17/2.8 and EVF- $1350.

The last "VNIR" Camera that I bought for work was in 1993, cost $12,400 for the body. A Kodak DCS200ir, the "ir" conversion was an extra $4000. 1.6MPixels, 80MByte SCSI disk.

Monochrome sensor. But- it still operates. The EP2 is much, much smaller...

 

[bo_lorentzen]

Not so sexy and 10 years after Chris' images.

Kodak DCS canon body 1998

Got a bunch of older files, but for some reason don't seem to be able to find them.. may come back with a older post once I dig them up and get them imported into LightRoom. 😀

Bo

www.bophoto.typepad.com