> we really take for granted how much the digital process has opened up for art reproducibility in the last 30 years.

Yep. I worked on the digital team in a video production shop for a short time in mid-1990 and it was interesting watching the analog guys setting up to send video up to us for capture. They'd load up a tape and then fiddle around with half a dozen knobs while watching a little analog 'scope screen that plotted several indicator dots showing information about the image quality. The screen was marked with little boxes indicating the ideal value for each parameter, and each knob would affect some or all of the parameters. The guy running it would spend a minute or two going back and forth adjusting knobs to try to get as many of the indicator dots as close to the target boxes as he could. He said they could get it pretty close, but they'd never get them all into the boxes, and if you loaded up the same tape again next week to do it again the dots would be in different locations. He said that's why they called NTSC video 'Never Twice the Same Color'.

Today it would be interesting to take that old equipment and connect it to a machine learning system and see how well it could adjust the inputs to get it set up precisely.