My knowledge and Google have both failed me: what is the Eikonic camera?
And your a fellow Senior member??? LOL!
OK, it was a group of chaps out of MIT headed by a very nice man named George Helms.
I'm 6'4" and George made me feel short - he was about 6'7"!
Here is a little info on the initial version that I consulted on. Now remember, much of what can be found is from the Kodak days. But the real work was done before they brought out the company (exempting Sasson's initial invention. I remember a meeting with the VP or Kodak Digital at a Siggraph convention. They had the device for a couple of years and were terrible at improving it or marketing it. I was pissed and told him that his division of Kodak could run a virgin through death row and she'd come out a virgin on the other side! Naturally, I've never been good at holding back my thoughts, especially when I knew they were valid:
EIKONIX- 1982. Eikonix Corporation marketed the first digital filming instrument. It had a 3000 pixel scanner which moved across 4000 lines to provide a 12MP image. First images were shades of grey, but later red, blue and green filters were added resulting in the first digital color film. We believe we were the first digital camera history web site to provide a photo and information concerning this camera.
As I said somewhere else on the forum, clean and consistent electrical current was a huge problem in getting a quality scan out of it.
My group wrote some code to run it: Run 3 scans of a static scene, one through a red, then green then blue filter and composite it into
a image file.
It was similar to the logic that later appeared in Management Graphics (MGI), headed by Jim Teeter, film recorder that my team developed
drivers from on the SGI platform over the SCSI pipe.
MGI applied the inverse of the Eikonic capture device/camera - shoot to a piece of color film (we had drivers that ran the cine film recorders in Tri-Star, Columbia, etc studios)
though each of the RGB filters and there you have a frame on the film from a computer generated file. We'd take about 28 seconds
as I recall to dump a frame of digital data to a frame of Kodak Cine film.
I could not find much on the net:
http://www.cameramuseum.ch/en/N5880/la-revolution-numerique-en.html?M=7588Attached is a photo of the earlier unit, again after Kodak took over.
Here is what a later version of it after Kodak bought the company and patents looked like:
http://www.peterjsucy.com/History/1988/EikonixBrochure.pdfIn short, to my knowledge it was the first real commercial digital camera after Sasson's invention/2MP device at Kodak.
I often ponder why there is so little info on the machine and the crew that invented it to be found on the
internet. Some time back I tried to find info on George but could not come up with much.
It certainly was an exciting time, yet as I said a few posts back, it troubled me about the future of "Fine Art Photography"
Jack