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So, by 1990 (and probably earlier, but I haven't checked) your office could purchase a Film Recorder.
This is a desktop gadget which you plug into your PC, and it prints your slides directly onto a 35mm filmstrip. You then have that developed and put into slide carriers.
Of course, the immediate question is... how does it do that? Well, it's very simple: There's another god damn monitor inside, and there's a camera pointed at it.
You might have noticed this. It's an off the shelf Nikon camera. You uh. You press the shutter button. Here's another one.
Now you'd think this would have the potential to not look... great. In 1990, computer monitors *were* available in high resolutions, but you may be aware that this didn't scale down very well. It was really hard to make a small color display with good dot-pitch at that time.
Again, Xerox would not have tolerated pixelated graphics on a presentation in front of 1,200 people, so something had to be done. The answer is that the CRTs were black and white and used a color wheel to sequentially image each color onto the film.
While it's not quite true to say that black and white CRTs have "unlimited" resolution, it's closer to the truth than not. These units all use CRTs around 3-4 inches if I understand correctly, at which size, yeah, resolution can be EXTREMELY good.
And indeed it was. Many of these devices (and there were TONS in 1990 - PC Magazine did a roundup of 12 of them ranging from $2500 to $15000) actually boasted 4k video. As in, four thousand lines, at who knows what horizontal resolution.
At least some of these devices I think could be driven directly from your video output, but most of the ones I've read about take what I think are proprietary vector formats, which makes perfect sense.
Making a computer output 4k video in 1990 was difficult because of the signaling bandwidth requirements in the DAC and cables, and the memory requirements on the computer. With vector input and a DAC right next to the drive circuitry, 4k would not have been that hard.
One of the higher end units looks like a water softener, and this is because inside of that is a 13" deep, 7" wide CRT. This was the $15k option the real motherfuckers were buying.
There are, of course, some standout bizarro-world options
This curiously compact unit ($6100) can do 4k slide prints, but has an extremely strange feature - it claims to be able to show you previews at 2000x500, *on a CGA monitor.* I cannot fathom how they managed this.
This curiously compact unit ($6100) can do 4k slide prints, but has an extremely strange feature - it claims to be able to show you previews at 2000x500, *on a CGA monitor.* I cannot fathom how they managed this.
Another unit, the ImageMaker Plus from Presentation Technologies, has no CRT at all. It has an LCD shutter and a bright halogen light which it steers with an optical assembly.
It can either burn images by tracing them with this "flying dot," or it can /direct the light through a stencil with a font cut out of it to project clean text onto the film/
I mean we are really in the goddamn twilight zone at this point. This is 1960s shit, this is the optical version of the Charactron, which did exactly this but with an electron beam shot through a metal font stencil onto a CRT.
By the way, the particular article I'm using for most of this is absolutely enormous and chock full of information - it's like 40 pages, so it's hard to consume in its entirety. So I missed this, for instance - companies were paying *A HUNDRED DOLLARS A SLIDE* in some cases.
