posted 01-30-2006 09:10 PM                       

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The Technology Collection

Bellows Camera The technology collection is one of the world's largest collections of photographic and cinematographic equipment. It contains nineteenth- and twentieth-century objects of photographic technology, including cameras, processing equipment, motion picture devices, and a broad range of early historical accessories. Many of the objects are unique, representing distinguished historical ownership and significant scientific achievement.

This collection is the most comprehensive held by any institution in North America and equaled in overall quality by only three other major holdings worldwide. From devices that pre-date the formal invention of photography in 1839 to the most modern state-of-the-art instruments used by both amateurs and professionals, the collection offers visitors an unparalleled opportunity to examine and learn about photographic technology.

The core collections are both European and American in origin; the greatest strengths are early French and American cameras.



Highlights

* An Edison Kinetoscope and a Cinématographe camera, made by the Lumière brothers in France, are the earliest commercially produced motion picture systems.
* An eighteenth-century camera obscura is the oldest item in the collection.
* One of two Giroux daguerreotype cameras in North America. Produced in 1839 for and signed by Daguerre, it is the world's first commercially manufactured camera.
* The Bemis daguerreotype camera outfit, built in 1840, is a key artifact in the early history of the process. The fitted wooden trunk containing all the equipment needed to make a full-plate daguerreotype was sold by François Gouraud, Daugerre's first sales agent in the United States, to a Boston dentist and jeweller, Samuel A. Bemis, on April 15, 1840, just six months after the process was announced. Bemis learned the process from François Gouraud. This outfit, complete with the original bill of sale, provides a unique link between France and America. It is one of the first camera outfits sold commercially in the United States.
* A lunar orbiter camera developed for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
* Speed Graphic camera used by Joe Rosenthal for the 1945 photograph of the flag raising on Iwo Jima
* Cameras and equipment used by such people Ansel Adams, Eadweard Muybridge, Arnold Newman, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston
* The largest collection of French daguerreotype cameras; the most varied collection of daguerreotype cameras
* One of the largest collections of American cameras in the world



Materials

Noble Camera The technology collection is made up of more than 16,000 separate items including

* 4,100 cameras (still and motion picture)
* 700 projectors (still and motion picture)
* 400 viewers (hand-held mono and stereo)
* 900 lenses
* 1700 equipment (accessories)
* 700 dark room (enlargers, timers, trays)
* 1500 supplies (film and paper packaging)
* 1700 exposure measuring instruments
* More than 4,000 items in the Eastman Kodak Company Patent collection



Access

Access to the collection is by appointment Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.



Contact

Technology Curator, Todd Gustavson Ext. 369

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posted 01-31-2006 05:47 AM                       

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In 1990, the Optical Radiation Corporation in collaboration with the Eastman Kodak Company introduced the world’s first digital audio format for film. Called Cinema Digital Sound, or CDS, it was first introduced to the public with the 70mm release of Dick Tracy. Unfortunately, it only enjoyed a handful of releases before ORC pulled the format from the marketplace. CDS was a highly engineered technology, incorporating an error detection and correction scheme in the printed bit map to ensure robustness of the digital signal. The bit map itself was impressive. Thanks to the support of Eastman Kodak and specially developed film stock, the format boasted a very tiny pixel size, giving the format lots of digital bandwidth on the film. Audio was recorded without data compression, but instead of the commonly used 16-bit linear PCM scale, it used a custom 12-bit logarithmic scale that produced excellent sound with a 90 dB dynamic range. Despite its clever engineering, CDS suffered from a major shortcoming, that being that the actual recorded digital sound track for 35mm films was placed where the stereo optical track normally resides. In other words, there wasn’t a stereo optical track that could be used as a backup. CDS also suffered from playback equipment problems, which, combined with the absence of a backup track, turned the major filmmakers away from the format. Optical Radiation’s CDS format should be remembered as the pioneer for today’s digital film sound formats. They were the first to introduce digital audio to the theatre, and the first to implement a discrete version of today’s popular 5.1 technique in a major exhibition format. The impact of the 5.1 format has been tremendous. From an artistic point-of-view, discrete digital sound has been a real boon, as it frees the mixers from the limitations and hassle of mixing audio for the matrix. Full range and discrete surround channels have given the mixers the ability to use these channels much more freely. If one were to listen to the mixes of today and those of 10 years ago, the degree of artistic freedom that the digital formats offer will be obvious.

More formats were soon to follow.

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