The Electronic Photography Division had one project which I felt we could upgrade to a digital version fairly quickly, and that was the Transfer Stand. Basically a copy stand for prints with an adaptor for slides. At the time Kodak was using a Sony NTSC composite video camera, because we didn't have an NTSC camera of our own at that point, though one was in the works. A composite video signal has a lot of noise and crosstalk, and not so great quality. An RGB video camera would have provided better image output quality than composite.
A digitized RGB video image would be the best. This paper proposed using the new M2 imager (1024 x 1024 pixels) with digital output instead of the Sony camera. Ken Parulski had come up with a method of doubling the resolution by shifting a half pixel over and down with a piece of glass, so I included his idea here. The sensor, while monochrome, could generate high quality color images by capturing sequential color with an RGB filter wheel. The video image would be captured via a built-in framestore or digitizer and could be transferred to a computer with a digital interface. It would have made a great product for Desktop Publishers. As I proved in my Print Quality Comparison in '86, a digitized image from a high quality source would provide the best looking prints, thermal or otherwise. I believe the Transfer Stand product was killed about a year or two later.
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