[1] In the early 1970s it became a leading manufacturer of precision color film recorders such as the D47 and D48.
Even though it was capable of displaying any digitized image data, it was originally developed for the display of digitized medical X-ray images from x-ray films that were scanned and image-processed digitally (in order to enhance contrast and other parameters) via computer and stored on 9-track computer tape.
A tape drive (or a computer itself) could then be interfaced to a D30 in order to display the processed image data.
[citation needed] The D30's dark-trace CRT made it possible for it to display an image continuously without the need for frame buffer memory (as that era's solid-state RAM memory devices were quite new and expensive, and the core memories also of the same era were limited in capacity) to refresh the image from periodically as is the case for a standard phosphor-based CRT, for the image would be retained on the CRT's scotophor layer of the screen until cleared by heating it.
Many of the early government (JPL, NCAR, NSA, CIA, Sandia Laboratories, et al.) computer graphics applications had their imagery in output to a Dicomed.