Active in the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Coons works behind the scenes in the film and computer graphics industries. He is also the president and owner of ArtScans Studio in
Culver City, California, where he uses a
scanner of his own invention to serve a clientele of celebrity artists and fine artists. According to the ArtScans website: "ArtScans has been doing accurate colour capture for reproduction since 1992. We own and operate a large (44" x 50") flatbed scanner that is the only one of its kind in the world. Both the scanner and its software were designed by us." Keith Goldfarb, co-founder of
Rhythm and Hues Studios, a computer-graphics studio that works on major motion pictures—
Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian and
The Chronicles of Riddick (2004)— as well as high-end commercials, has called him "the most knowledgeable person about scanning on this planet."
Digital printing David Coons was also a pioneer in the art of
digital printing reproduction of scanned and computer generated artwork, specifically adapting the large format
IRIS printer, a machine designed to work solely with proprietary
prepress computer systems, to this task. In the late 1980s Coons developed software to use an IRIS 3024 at
The Walt Disney Company to print images from Disney's new
Computer Animation Production System. He also wrote software to print works created on
desktop computers such as
Sally Larsen's 1989
Transformer series and a 1990 photography exhibition for
Graham Nash of
Crosby, Stills, and Nash. The work he did for Nash had to do with re-creating images for prints and negatives had been lost by scanning the remaining
contact prints at high resolution, and printing them in extremely large format. Coons went on to become a business partner with Nash, helping found the
Manhattan Beach, California, company
Nash Editions, a fine art digital reproduction company based on a $126,000 IRIS printer Nash had purchased. There Coons worked on the many technical problems with scanning and adapting the IRIS printer to fine art printing, including modifying the machines to take heavy paper stock and dealing with the poor fade resistant (
fugitive) nature of the inks. These fine art digital prints came to be known by the name "
giclée". In the mid-1990s, Coons shifted his focus exclusively to scanning, while Nash Editions continued to specialize in fine art printing. The two companies maintain a close relationship and often refer clients to each other. ==Film production==