history

Final Years

This time, we became tenants in a relatively large office building with room to expand, also in Dedham. Our square footage more than tripled, with additional space available if/when we needed. We sold our little building (to the optometrist who checked our eyes), packed everything up, and moved into our new, classy, professional offices.

Things kept on growing on all fronts. We brought on more employees to help deal with it all, in the areas of tech support, marketing, product testing, and front office duties. We took our even-spiffier new booth to even more trade shows. ComputerEyes had become an industry standard for affordable video capture for owners of small computers in all walks of life.

During this period, our crack marketing and sales departments also landed a contract with Canon USA, who produced a "still video camera" called the Canon XapShot. ComputerEyes was a perfect mate to it, since the XapShot froze the image for ComputerEyes to perform its slow scan into the computer. Digital Vision sold hundreds of ComputerEyes systems through Canon's distribution channels.

Did we rest on our laurels? No way! The next wave of improvements in our products came in the form of speed. The ComputerEyes/RT (for Real Time) versions were true "frame grabbers" — they could capture an entire image in 1/30 second, obviating the need to point the camera at a still object (or pause a VCR). These versions were more expensive but easier for customers to use, and met with excellent sales success. RT models were produced for PCs and Macintosh (the older 8-bit computers had pretty much fallen by the wayside).

And then came ... TelevEyes! This product family performed the opposite function of ComputerEyes: They converted the signal going to the computer's monitor to a standard video signal that could be recorded on a VCR or displayed on a big-screen TV. In other words, it would "televize" whatever was on the computer screen (get it?). Several versions were developed for PCs and Macintosh, including a "Pro" version that allowed one to overlay the computer's output on top of live video (the "Roger Rabbit" effect). All versions sold quite well and gave the company a more diversified product line.