Quantel Paintbox

The Quantel Paintbox is a dedicated computer graphics workstation for composition of broadcast television video and graphics. Its design emphasizes the studio workflow efficiency required for live news production. Following its initial launch in 1981, it revolutionised the production of television graphics, and is still in widespread use todayVague|date=April 2008.

Initially running on custom-designed hardware, it now runs on standard serversFact|date=April 2008. Many features of earlier generations are now considered standard on personal computersFact|date=April 2008. It is still the industry standard among professionals in the field of TV production.

It was used by six artists and designers, including David Hockney and Richard Hamilton, to create original artwork in the 1986 BBC Series "Painting With Light".

In the late 1980s Quantel embarked on lawsuits against the Adobe "Photoshop" software package and the Spaceward Graphics "Matisse" system in an attempt to protect patented aspects of the Paintbox system. They won the initial case against Spaceward in 1990, but finally lost the case against Adobe in 1997 following depositions and demonstrations by a number of Computer Graphics pioneers including Alvy Ray Smith and Dick Phillips.

In the 90s, Quantel was widely use in Arte, the European Network. François Vautier was one of their most talented designers.

External links

* [http://www.quantel.com/site/en.nsf/html/paintbox_home Information about Quantel's latest version of Paintbox]
* [http://accad.osu.edu/~waynec/history/PDFs/paint.pdf Alvy Ray Smith - Digital Paint Systems.] Includes information about the Quantel/Adobe lawsuit.
* [http://old.siggraph.org/publications/newsletter/v32n3/contributions/phillips.html Computer Graphics in Court: The Adobe/Quantel Case]