2024 was another exciting year at DT. From welcoming new clients & partners in new countries, to launching innovative new products and events, it was a journey of continuing our mission to be custodians of heritage.
Whether through improving digitization quality and capabilities, or disseminating knowledge to raise the level of digitization efforts throughout the heritage community, 2024 set a new benchmark in both innovations as well as our global reach. Here’s a look back at just a few of the milestones from the last twelve months.
New Products
DT has long been a leader in innovating digitization solutions to solve problems for our partners. 2024 was no different, with several unique items created by our R+D team in conjunction with some of the world’s leading heritage institutions to test and prove their effectiveness.
DT Pod
The DT Pod was created to solve a common problem in many digitization environments – keeping environmental light and color reflections out, while keeping the digitization station light from intruding on other common areas in the building.
The DT Pod’s rock-solid and durable design, certified fire-resistant fabric, and clever “Top Hat” that allows light-tight air flow creates not only better lighting for digitization, but a better ergonomic situation for those working inside—and outside—of the digitization system as a whole.
BETTER LIGHTING, BETTER ERGONOMICS
DT Honeycomb
The DT Honeycomb is a light-shaping accessory that reduces eye strain, flare, and scattered light, enhancing ergonomics and image quality during digitization. Compatible with DT Stellar, DT Photon Mark II, and now DT Gemini, the DT Honeycomb ensures efficient, safe workflows without affecting light quality.
SAME LIGHT QUALITY, LESS EYE STRAIN
DT Nexus Beta Program
While DT Nexus was announced in 2023 (originally called FADGI Flow during development), the beta program put this program out in the wild for the first time, to get real-world testing from our clients. The feedback since then has been both incredibly positive and incredibly helpful, and we thank everyone that’s taken advantage of the beta program in order to help us prepare for the public launch of DT Nexus (watch this space for more updates…).
For those not familiar, DT Nexus was created to improve every aspect of your digitization workflow by connecting your camera, bench, lighting, and software into a unified system, adding enhancements and improvements not possible without this central control. It provides seamless color profiling, color profile validation, with control over your camera, DT Autocolumn, and RAW settings. Plus, full control of your DT Stellar lighting system directly from the capture station, with advanced features like individual light adjustment in increments as small as 1/100th of a stop, and light grouping to easily adjust them together.
Turn Your Digitization Tools Into a Digitization System
DT Transmissive Target
The first-of-its-kind, emulsion-independent DT Nexus Transmissive Profiling Target is a professional-grade transparent color profiling and reference target with significant precision, accuracy, durability, and build quality. Both the Profiling andValidation targets are for those seeking the most robust, accurate, and precise transparent color reference and validation targets available.
FIRST EVER EMULSION-INDEPENDENT TRANSMISSIVE TARGET
DT iXH 100MP
DT introduced the iXH 100mp mid-way through 2024. The newest engine for DT’s digitization solutions, it lowered the barrier to entry for institutions doing preservation-grade digitization, with all the same features and capabilities as the iXH 150mp, but with a smaller sensor, moderately lower resolution, and much lower price.
The DT iXH 100mp Camera System delivers incredible image quality as its big brother – A powerful preservation-grade digitization camera system built for perfectly supporting high volume cultural heritage digitization programs. The sensor’s dynamic range of 15 f-stops boosts light sensitivity with minimal noise, capturing the smallest details with unmatched color fidelity.
Making Preservation-Grade Digitization More Accessible
New Digitization Guides
After more than 5 years and over 1,000 downloads, our popular collection of digitization guides has become a go-to source for digitization knowledge, planning, and best practices. But technology moves fast, and a lot changes in 5 years, so they were all due for an update with the latest software, hardware, techniques, and best practices revised within the guides.
At our roundtable in October, we officially released the new 2025 versions of all four guides, and they’ve since been downloaded over 400 times in the first 3 months. If you still have the old ones, now is the time to update them and see what’s changed in digitization over the last few years.
Events
Workshop Webinars
In addition to exhibiting at conferences like SAA and ALA, 2024 also saw the launch of an ongoing series of workflow training “Workshop Webinars” to share knowledge and best practices—at no cost—to digitization professionals around the world. With over 60 countries attending, and more than 6,000 registrants across all 4 events, it was the largest and most widely impactful event program in DT’s history. For a full recap of the events, as well as full videos of the webinars themselves, check out our recap page at the link below.
2024 Cultural Heritage Roundtable in NYC
Similarly, our annual roundtable event has continued to build as partners, customers, collaborators, and digitization enthusiasts from around the world joined us both in-person in New York City, as well as on our full-day live feed of the event. It was the largest audience we’ve ever had for one of our roundtables, including people from dozens of countries. We were even able to expand the event by hosting a European segment earlier in the day with speakers joining live from across the Atlantic and presenting to our European heritage community.
We once again owe a huge debt of gratitude to the speakers that were kind enough to make the trip and present their invaluable knowledge in-person, as well as everyone internationally who either got up early or stayed up late to watch live. Thank you all!
The full recap, along with every speaker presentation, is online for review at the link below.
2024 Cultural Heritage Roundtable Recap
What’s Next?
We already have some very exciting things lined up for 2025 to continue our mission (including some surprises that will be announced in the next month). We’re looking forward to the journey the next 12 months brings, and wishing the entire Heritage Community a positive and productive year as well. Happy 2025, everyone!
And as always, if you have any questions about your own digitization needs, don’t hesitate to reach out.