help me do analog powerpoint (Patreon)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku7yPTOiLzo

This is not a finished video, but it's a preview of an upcoming one, assuming things go well. I could use some materials to get it done however and they aren't cheap, so I figured I should ask if anyone has them on hand; see the end of the post for that Call To Action.

So what we have here is the Polaroid Digital Palette, a device I've wanted to cover for a while. I actually got one during my last trip to California but ended up getting rid of it for... reasons? I think I thought it was broken. I now have one that works perfectly however, so I started digging into it a bit.

The idea in a nutshell: It's 1991, you want to make a presentation on the computer, and you want to project it at a board meeting. Computer graphics cards are still very low res; anything above 640x480 is exotic, and (as far as I know) projectors that can handle better resolutions are either nonexistent or fiendishly expensive and large. In any case, computers and data projectors are not cheap, ubiquitous or particularly portable, so the modern option of just carrying a laptop to wherever you're going and either bringing a projector or assuming there'll be one there is not viable.

The gold standard for presentations is still physical slides, and it is commonplace in this era to assume there will be a Kodak-compatible carousel projector wherever you're going, so if you can get your computer images into 35mm film slides, you can just pack a loaded carousel in your luggage. But how do you get the image from the PC to a slide?

Again, computer graphics suck in these days - you CAN get high res color monitors, but they're expensive and rare, and hard to photograph since they're curved and have shadow masks and photographing CRTs is just hard. And what other way can you get a picture out of a PC? Color inkjet printers exist, but they print with translucent ink that only works on white stock; for transparency film to work, you need a black background, and there just isn't any technology that can print on that. So, enter the Film Printer.

This is by no means a Polaroid-exclusive market; there were hundreds of the things, of many different types, but the principle is universal: while high res color monitors and cards were rare and expensive, that was only because they needed to display images quickly, in full color, and big enough for you to see them. Eliminate all three of those requirements and the problem becomes MUCH easier to solve.

The CI-3000 contains a monochrome CRT, about 3" on the diagonal. Why monochrome? Because there's no shadow mask, which means the display has very nearly infinite resolution. Phosphor is very fine-grained and electron beams are very easy to control precisely, especially on small screens, so this thing can produce a whopping 2K-equivalent image. It's brother, the CI-5000, could do 4K, and the devices were $4500 and $6000 respectively.

That's very impressive sounding, and dirt cheap, for 1991. But hang on, there's problems - what about color? Surely you don't want black and white slides, right? Well, no worries: This thing delivers 24-bit color. And that's problem number two: how in the HELL can this resolution be possible, in color, with 1991-grade technology, at less than $10,000??

The answers to both come down to the film part of the equation. The CI-3000 comes with a "camera" - though this word is doing a lot of lifting. What this actually is is a film transport and a lens. There is no shutter, no aperture, no viewfinder. This is a thing that can hold a roll of 35mm film and move it one frame at a time; that's it.

How does this solve the problem? Well, film has this neat property that it absorbs whatever light you apply to it, cumulatively. So - as seen in the video linked above - the Palette displays the image sent to it one line at a time, very slowly; it takes about 30-40 seconds to complete a pass. When it's done, the entire image has been built up on the film, one line at a time, to form a complete picture.

This solves so many problems. The PC doesn't need a 2K/4K graphics card (which might not even have existed yet); the Palette doesn't need a 2K/4K color CRT (see above); the PC doesn't need to send the entire full res image all at once; the Palette doesn't need the (then-enormous) bank of RAM to hold that whole image. It's fantastic.

But that just leaves us with one problem: How does it do color?

In the tradition of the waning days of electromechanics: It doesn't. It fakes it using a color wheel containing three color filters, a clear window (for black and white prints) and an opaque section to act as a shutter. Every slide is broken into three color channels and displayed one at a time, so a complete slide takes something like 2.5 minutes to "print." Again, film operates cumulatively, so the red, green and blue images stack up and combine.

The beauty of this approach can't be overstated: this produces a 24-bit color image using only the components of a black and white monitor and a single ADC, very little RAM, and no aliasing! Because there's no shadow mask, all three images are perfectly superimposed; you aren't seeing alternating stripes or dots of color, so there's no risk of moire.

This is a Foveon computer printer!

It's absolutely brilliant, and the wildest thing is that it works. I removed the color filters for my video up above (and foolishly forgot to reinstall them and shoot another video before tediously reassembling the whole thing) but you can see that it's all doing what it should: the wheel rotates, the CRT displays three distinct images, and I can even show you what those three images might look like:

I took these by holding my phone against the aperture, hence the wobbliness, but this is the calibration test card - note the three different wedges, I think meant to clearly identify which is which. Had I lined these up at all, you can tell that we could have combined them into a single monochrome shot.

Also, while I've had a fiendish time trying to get a clean picture of it...

...this is a partial example of what an actual printed image would look like.

So: Obviously the thing is incredibly cool on it's face. But we aren't done, because the way it's supposed to be used is even cooler.

This thing lets you get your Powerpoint slides onto film, but what do you do with the film? Well, back in the 80s when this technique was new and you were working for a coke-fueled Wall Street firm where time was money and everyone had gold-and-glass coffee tables in their offices, you'd call for a bike courier to pick up the film and take it to a developer who'd send it back an hour and a half later - if you were incredibly lucky - developed and mounted in slides.

But suppose you didn't have an hour and a half, or didn't trust your courier not to get hit by a car or stop for lunch or or or. The Palette suggests a faster way of doing things.

This is Polachrome, one of Polaroid's instant slide films. It is standard 35mm film that will fit into any ordinary camera, and you shoot it more or less like normal, but once you're done...

...you insert it into the Polaroid AutoProcessor, a little desktop minilab!

That cube that comes with the film is a pack of developing chemicals, and this thing... somehow... marries the two together Just So. You crank the crank, follow the instructions, and a couple minutes later you have a roll of developed slide film. Polaroid also sold a tiny portable slide cutter and mounter, and this was the intended use case for the Digital Palette.

Once you had your presentation, all you had to do was spit it into TGAs, wait for each one to get printed to film, then run it through this thing and splice it into slides, and you were ready for your presentation, without ever leaving the building. It's honestly a genius idea and I really want to do a video about it. Here's where you may come in:

Has anyone messed with this stuff lately? I'd never heard of it until now, and I just read a blog post describing the developer turning into gunk instead of working. There are plenty of specimens on ebay, but it's about $30 a roll, which is a lot to burn on potentially bad film and developer, especially if I have no idea what I'm doing, or if this stuff is known bad at this point.

So, has anyone gotten Polachrome to work in the last couple years, or is it all bad? Failing that, have you gotten Polapan (the B&W equiv) to work, or is that all bad? If it's not all bad, do you have some of this stuff that you think is good, and that you would send me with reasonable haste so I can get cracking on this project?

While I probably could finagle a demo out of this machine using normal film (I even know someone who does home development) I think this video would hit way, WAY harder if I could do this as intended - by actually printing, developing, mounting and projecting the slides all in one sitting while the camera rolled. If you can help me out, either with supplies and expertise, or with contemporary knowledge of this device and it's cohort if you have any, I'm all ears.

Thank you all so much!