ThunderScan was a single dot scanner that replaced the ribbon cartridge in my Apple ImageWriter Printer. You fed a photo into the rollers and via the ThunderScan software you could capture 1-bit (Black or White) images of the photo. These could be edited in MacPaint. It was not a great leap to imagine color. This convinced me that the computer, not the TV was where we would be managing and editing our photos in the future. It would take a few more years to convince anybody else at Kodak.
At this point (Sept 1985), I had finally been released from servitude in the QA Lab and had joined the advanced development team on the 3rd floor of Building 1, at the Elmgrove Plant. This new division, Consumer Electronics, was selling videotape and 8mm camcorders built by Matsushita. They were in the process of developing a line of products based on the new Still Video Floppy. An analog recording device, and unfortunately, a product I immediately deemed would be DOA, due to the extremely poor image quality. What were they thinking! That was something that would need to be changed! Digital was the way to go but Kodak was far from realizing that at this point.
I was assigned to work on the new SV7510 Still Video Printer which used Kodak Instant Film. They needed somebody to improve the color reproduction, and I was chosen due to my darkroom experience. However, if you understood the sensitometric characteristics of Kodak Instant film, you'd know that the color balance could vary significantly from picture to picture, within a single pack of Instant film. So, it was not going to be an easy task.
As I got to know the product manager, I began to bring in prints of my photos that I had scanned with my ThunderScanner, and edited in MacPaint, to try and convince him that computers and digital imaging were the future, analog was a dead end.
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