Quantel were a small company based in Newbury, England that were part of a succesful industrial electronics company, Micro Consultants, set up by Peter Michael and Bob Graves. The company had achieved success by developing revolutionary analog to digital converters and one of the world's first digital framestores.
Micro Consultants had designed a bespoke computer called "Intellect" and set up a video division as that sector of the business took off. In 1975, the head of the video division, Richard Taylor, was transferred to Quantel where he would team up with Head of R&D, Paul Kellar.
The development of a digital paint device started in 1976, with an 8 bit system based on the Intellect privately shown to broadcasters during IBC in London but, with jagged edges and lines, the quality was too low and no interest was shown by potential buyers. Quantels Richard Taylor clearly identified that the fundamental challenge was not just to create a system which could paint something that looked completely realistic, it was to make that system work in real time and with a user interface so simple that the artist using it would quickly forget they were on a computer. The word was "transparency" and in 1980, Taylor briefed the small development team, consisting of Paul Kellar, Tony Searby and George Catlow, that the Paintbox should never be noticed by the viewer and never get in the way of the creative. Thanks to Paul Kellar's Eureka meeting moment, they cracked it.
Adrian Wilson interviewed many of the original Quantel employees involved and wrote this, the first definitive history of the Paintbox for the Computer History Museum
Read it here...
CHM History of the Quantel Paintbox
The first buyer was of the $157,800 Quantel DPB 7000 Digital Paint Box following the reveal in 1981 was the Weather Channel, followed by all the other major broadcasters.
By 1982, the Paint Box had graphics and was able to create masks, so could cut out, and finely manipulate any part of an image. Quantel was the first large computer graphics manufacturer to convince traditional type foundries to license their fonts available digitaly and by 1983, upgrades to the Paintbox created a complete painting, graphic design, typesetting, photo manipulation and animation studio in one seamlessly intercommunicating digital package. Something that is unheard of even today.
The ultimate digital studio was now complete.
Independent production houses such as Charlex and Broadway Video in NYC and CAL Videographics and Moving Picture Company in London made a fortune by purchasing the Paintbox and creating amazing new TV commercials and music videos on it.
The Paintbox was the first user friendly, real time, 24 bit, full color, broadcast quality, pressure sensitive stylus operated, digital studio in the world and it would be nearly a decade before it faced any serious competition. By that time, the Paintbox was THE industry standard - cheaper, more compact and complete with a range of related Quantel machines which could also edit, animate and create 3D.
PAINTBOX TIMELINE
1981 - DPB-7000 Digital Paint Box prototype
Though other machines were available, they all had shortcomings such as complex interfaces or jaggy lines. The Paint Box was a bespoke closed-system machine that Quantel's genius hardware and software engineers squeezed every ounce of computing power out of the best available components of the time.
None of this was cheap, with an early Paintbox costing around $157,800 plus monitor and other peripherals but each one soon paid for itself by vastly reducing the time it took to create TV graphics and by attracting new viewers (and therefore more advertising dollars) to any broadcaster who bought one.
1983 - DPB-7000 Digital Paint Box
This is the fully-fledged Paintbox that became the workhorse in countless Broadcast TV studios and video post-production facilities around the world.
1984 - GPB Graphic Paintbox
By adding more framestores to a DPB7000, Quantel first demonstrated to an amazed crowd at IPEX '84 in Birmingham, UK that it was possible to create a photo quality version of the video Paintbox. Digital photography was in its infancy, with everything still shot on film but once it had been scanned, the Graphic Paintbox could manipulate images as fast and easily as the DPB could manipulate video. Incredibly expensive at $400,000 each, the Graphic Paintbox nonetheless set the standard in the reprographic and digital retouching industry for years, creating iconic images 5 years before Photoshop 1.0 was even launched.
1985 - The Military Paintbox
Quantel's failed attempt to break into the tightly restricted defence and government supply field by combining a Paintbox with their aircraft-mounted Scanline sensor, Crystal image enhancer and Revue data store. As is listed on this exhibition stand, Quantel hoped the system could be used for analyzing airborn pollution, coastguard surveillance, sonar signals and weapons testing analysis, as well as the usual Paintbox graphics and image manipulation purposes. The Military Paintbox was not a sales success and was a very short-lived distraction from their core Broadcast Sector business.
1989 - V-Series Paintbox
The original Paint Box was large and expensive but in 1989, Quantel launched a cheaper and more compact version, named because it followed the Version 4 software upgrade on the DPB. By this time, the Paintbox was so much of an industry standard, it had become one word and a verb for digital image manipulation, much like Photoshop is today. A Paintbox Junior, without any video input or output, could be bought for $60,000 and a basic V-Series video Paintbox started at $90,000
<
1990 - Harriet
Quantel added a video storage device called a Ramcorder to the Paintbox, enabling the user to store and manipulate 12 seconds of video. Though this doesn't sound much, the main task for these machines was to create graphics and animation for TV show titles, intros and graphics, which were only a few seconds in length anyway. The Harriet was also excellent for Rotoscoping and the 12 second clips could be edited into longer sequences if required.
1994 - Printbox Quantel expanded their photo quality Paintbox range with the Printbox, aimed at the publishing industry. As can be seen in this demo, Printbox could fully integrate with Apple and other competitor devices/software using their Courier Image Management workflow.
1995 - GPB2
As with the video Paintbox, Quantel managed to shrink the original huge GPB down to a cheaper desktop size but Adobe's Photoshop had by this time become good enough software to make it hard to justify the .
V-Series variants
By adding various extra features, Quantel sold the V-Series into the early 2000's. A HD version of the Paintbox has a lot of internal technical differences but versions such as Express, Bravo, Esprit and F.A.T. were often marketing name changes rather than vastly different machines, though Quantel did notably add Java, TCP networking and over a thousand fonts to the Paintbox to try and maintain its appeal.
However, Quantel was fighting a losing battle against much cheaper Mac/PC based software solutions such as Photoshop.