Date: Wed, 17 Feb 93 17:04:46 PST
From: macmod@SUMEX-AIM.Stanford.EDU (Info-Mac Moderator)
ec.photo,rec.video,comp.sys.atari.st,comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc,comp.s ys.mac,comp.sys.mac.digest
Path: mfolivo
From: mfolivo@sactoh0.sac.ca.us (Mark Newton-John)
Subject: Definitive Photo CD (specs, file formats, etc)
Message-Id: <1993Feb17.100606.5305@sactoh0.sac.ca.us>
Keywords: Magazine_article
Organization: Sacramento Public Access Unix
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 93 10:06:06 GMT
To: pacbell!ames!comp-sys-mac-digest@ames.arc.nasa.gov
Resent-To: backmod
Resent-Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1993 17:04:45 PST
Resent-From: Info-Mac Moderator <macmod@sumex-aim.Stanford.EDU>
Here is a informative article about the specifications of Photo CD.
PLEASE, followups to the appropriate newsgroups! Atari Falcon/030
applications mean little to IBM PS/2, and vice versa. This article
is of general interest.
This article is from Dealerscope Merchadising Magazine, a trade
publication for electronics retailers.
Photo CD: New Business Opportunities for Graphics and Photo
Professionals
While ultimately aimed at consumers, Kodaks new technology initially
is attracting graphics professionals. Software announced in August
will let DOS/Windows and Mac users read and save Photo CD image,
adjust colors and enhance pictures.
Features added to Kodaks's Photo CD system will allow sound, text.
and graphics to be recorded along with photo-quality images onto
Photo CD discs. THe discs, which will be housed in attractive "jewel
boxe" case displaying the recorded images, will play back on TV,
using dedicated Photo CD players.
For nearly two decades, Peter Mackey has been creating audiovisual
presentations and video productions for busines and industry.
As vice president-media integration at Imergy, and interactive
multimedia production and graphics firm in Norwalk, CT, Mackey is a
beta site for the much heralded Photo CD technology on the way from
Eastman Kodak Co. Simply stated, Photo CD puts 35mm film photos onto
compact disc.
In August, Kodak announced software that lets DOS/Windows and
Macintosh users import and enhance Photo CD images, plus a host of
new formats and functions aimed directly at graphics and photography
professionals.
Beta Tester Mackey is using Photo CD to produce narrated
essays, captioned photo albums, and other projects that he is more
secretive about. These have given him an early insight into the value
of Photo CD.
"If designers and artists can personally experience what
these products can do," said Mackey, "I have no doubt that they will
be sold on Photo CD."
Opens busines doors
For the computer graphics community, Photo CD promises to bring forth
not only a robust, innovative medium, but also new business
opportunities. Kodak itself is betting a large part of its future on
Photo CD- essentially a hybrid electronic imaging/silver halide film-based technology intended to keep alive and hopefully grow users'
ingrained habit of recording events and locations on film.
Kodak is pumping about $30 million dollars into an ad
campaign to promote Photo CD products, banking that the technology
holds out the potential to be a "VCR"-line blockbuster product.
While Kodak's ultimate focus is on the vast consumer
marketplace where billions of dollars in film sales are at stake,
Kodak is also very much aware that its battle also entails engaging
the hearts and minds of the professional, industrial, and commercial
computer graphics communities.
For it is the visually creative practitioners who are likely
to be the inital benficiaries and trend setters in applying Phot CD
in myriad, unforseen ways.
Photo Database
For computer picture professionals, Photo CD's greatest potential is
as an input source for digital images used in computer-based
presentations and computer graphics of all kinds. "We can use Photo
CD as a photo capture and archiving system and also as a delivery
platform," Mackey said.
While technolgy to scan film and hard copy directly to
computer-readable media has been around for some time, existing
systems work too slowly and cost too much for even high-volume shops.
Photo CD overcomes this price/performance drawback.
The film scanner component if the Sun Microsystems-based
Photo CD Imaging Workstation (PIW) digitizes a full-color 35mm frame
into a very high resolution image- 2048x3072- in just six seconds. To
achieve this level of resolution, competing scanners typically take
several minutes.
Not surprisingly then, such fast performance also yields more
palatble costs. Kodak estimates that a typical user will pay $20 to
transfer a 24-frame roll of 35mm film onto a compact disc in Kodak's
proprietary Photo CD format.
Bought Image Bank
Likewise, Photo CD will intrude in traditional photo sources. Wanting
to encourage demand for images in Photo CD format, Kodak last year
bought the Image Bank, one of the largest film stock houses in the
world. Using the Kodak PIW, Image Bank will be able to transfer its
hundreds of thousands of 35mm negatives held in inventory to Phot CD
files rapidly and inexpensively.
On August 25, Kodk announced plans for a Kodak Picture
Exchange to go online next year using the public telephone network,
much like text and data networks such as CompuServe. The Kodak
Picture Exchange will link stock photo houses, graphic designers,
pubishers, and oher distributors of images, and end users.
Looking ahead, film will not long remain Photo CD's only
image source. Kodak recently engaged Polaroid to manufature a Photo
CD scanner to handle instant photos and existing prints whose
negatives are lost.
Kodak will market the scanner as an accssory under its own
brand name to be sold along with the PIW to photo finishing labs and
others having the output volume neccessary to warrant purchase of the
$100,000-plus PIW system. Scanning capability is also being expanded
to cover a variety of positive and negative film formats beyond 35mm-
including 70mm, 120, and 4x5-inch.
Four Basic Subsystems
The turnkey PIW system consists of four basic subsystems: The film
scanner, which digitizes negatives or slides, scanning film at a
maximum resolution of 2048 lines by 3072 pixels by 12 bits in each of
the primary colors; the Data Manager, which encodes the image data,
automatically performing color and density adjustments; the Writer,
which writes the digitized information to a Photo CD disc; and the
Printer, which produces what Kodak refers to as a "near-photographic-quality" prints along with the thumbnail prints that serve as a
picture index on the Photo CD storage case.
The device also spews out standard-size prints and
enlargements up to 10 inches square.
There's even more functionality coming. Starting in 1993,
photo finishers will be equipped to record tet, graphics, and sound
on Photo CD discs; they will also be able to encode attribute data
and other information on the discs that enable non-linear sequencing
of the images to be programmed for playback.
Photo CD playback takes place not just on one's computer
display- where images can be manipulated- bit on an ordinary
television set. This is key to Kodak's making Photo CD a burgeoning
consumer electronics product.
Kodak's approach entails use of a specialized Photo CD player
that Kodak recently began shipping; and in a a stroke of consumer
merchandising foresight, the unit also plays back audio on ordinary
compact discs.
In all, Kodak offers a selection of four Photo CD player
models. A basic unit carries a $449 list price. But the top-of-the-line model offers some stunning capabilities. With it, an operator
can change the viewing sequence at will, zoom in or out of an image
using crop marks to focus in on any area of the image, and view the
images under manual control or by automatic timing.
This high-end player also incorporated a five-disc carousel
along with capabilites to handle composite video, S-video, and audio
output. Its price: $549.
Kodak is even working on the ultimate jukebox player for the
image junkie. It has exhibited a prototype player holding
approximately 100 discs- or a nominal capacity of 10,000 images. The
device selecs a disc, transports it to a built-in reader, and begins
reding the disc- all in four seconds.
For those who want to manipulate images and ultimately
incorporate Photo CD images into a properly-sequenced, client
presentation, Kodak launched at last month's MacWorld its Photo CD
Access software.
Available now for $40, it enables any user of PC Windows or
Macinosh to access any image on a Photo CD disc; select and display a
desired image or sequence of images; export the selected photo to a
file in such formats as EPS, TIFF, RIFF, PCX, and PICT; crop and
otherwise edit an image and paste it into any image processing,
desktop publishing, and other Photo CD compatible application.
In addition, Kodak offers PhotoEdge, a $139 program that lets
Mac and Windows users zoom, crop, rotate, and flip Photo CD images;
and adjust color, cotrast, and focus. For storage and retreival,
Kodak will sell later this year its $399 Kodak Shoebox software for
Windows and Mac users. The Shoebox also works with Kodak Picture
Exchange.
Photo CD Access software, however, is a entry-level, interim
package that will become redundant once traditional software packages
become Photo CD enabled. Towards that end, Kodak also sells a Photo
CD Access Developer's Toolkit, priced at $695, intended to encourage
application devleopers and other third parties to incorporate Photo
CD compatibility into their products.
Apple, Kodak Team
Apple announced Aug. 25 it will work with Kodak to incorporate Photo
CD access into curent and future Macintoh operating systems. Apple is
also building Photo CD compatability into its QuickTime multimedia
software; Micrografx Inc. has done the same with regard to its
Picture Publisher software; EFI for its Cachet color managemnt
software; Corel Corp. for CorelDraw; and Media Cybernetics for the
Halo Desktop Imager image processing package.
With Photo CD compatibility, a professional graphics creator
will be able to import Photo CD images into an existing system, edit
and combine them with other graphics, text, video, and audio
elements, blending all of the disparate data types into a state-of-the-art presentation.
The Toolkit actually consists of a library of C language
functions that (1) read images from Photo CD discs into memory, (2)
decompress high-resolution images, and (3) provide basic image
manipulation capability. The Toolkit cannot be used to compress
images and write them directly to a disc; that is a task for the PIW
system- a strategy adopted by Kodak to assure high-quality image
recording on film.
In fact, Photo CD is a practicable technology because it
utilizes image compression and decompression effectively. Just how
Kodak handles this proprietary aspect of Photo CD turns out to be
both surpising and ingenious.
A Photo CD image is actually sored five times at five
different resolutions on the same disc; this bundle of digitized
pictures is called an ImagePac.
At the high end- denoted by 2048x3072 as well as 1024x1536
resolutions- images are stored in compressed form to reduce storage
requirements; the lesser resolution images- 512x768, 256x384. and
128x192- are stored in noncompressed form.
The different resolutions are used as follows: 128x192 for
thumbnail index images printed on each disc jacket and used for image
retrieval; 256x384 for previewing images on a computer screen;
512x768 for standard NTSC imagery; 1025x1536 for High Definition TV
(HDTV) signals; and 2048x3072 for output to high-quality print.
Fills Up to 6Mb
Each Photo CD ImagePac occupies a total of three to six Mbytes,
depending on the actual high-resolution image compression achieved.
With present technology, it takes about an hour to fill a disc with
100 ImagePacs on a disc.
What is of concern to end users is the type of CD-ROM drives
neccessary to access Photo CD images. It requires an XA copact disc
drive that supports so-called Mode 2 multisession operation, meaning
that one 24-film roll can be recorded in one PIW session, and then at
a later time returned to the photo finisher with another roll of film
for recording on the same disc to add more image frames.
The Photo CD approach contrasts with traditional CD-ROM
drives where an entire disc is recorded in a single session. In both
cases, once recorded, the images in a given sector an be read
repeatedly, but they cannot be erased nor can they be recorded over.
Such multisession drives wll be made by Philips, which along
with Kodak co-developed Photo CD. Likewise, Sony, Pioneer, and
Toshiba all plan to enter the market Photo CD compatible multi-session CD-ROM XA drives; the four manufacturers collectively account
for 85 percent of the current market for CD-ROM dirves.
Aside from the question of its ultimate acceptance, Photo CD
raises another issue of concern to computer graphics professionals:
the viablilty of the compression step that causes the higher
resolution images to lose a bit of clarity, an essential tradeoff in
exchange for efficient data storage. Presenations creator Mackey
insists that he can see no deterioration in image quality when
eyeballing his Photo CD works. However, neither he, nor anyone else,
has worked with the tchnology to create, for example. slick magazine
covers and pages. In such applications, even Kodak offocials have
conceded tha Photo CD images will not be adaquate because of
resolution loss.
What about the use of Photo CD for high quality poster-size
reproductions? One tell-tale experience is forthcoming from Alexandra
Asmanis, creative director at Asmanis Design & Associates in
Somerville, MA. Her design firm has begun an experiment to create
20x20-inch posters using Photo CD as an image source.
Image security is yet another concern to some professional
designers, artists, and photographers. No encryption technology is
encorporated into the basic Photo CD to help image originators
protect their creations.
However, a Kodak Pro Photo CD Master disc, designed for
professional photogtaphers and due to be available in the spring of
1993, offers three security features: a special identifier to
indicate image ownership and copyright, the ability to place a
watermark (such as "PROOF") over an image, and the ability to encrypt
high resolution images. The Pro Photo CD Master disk, which otherwise
looks like its consumer cousin, also will store images from larger
film formats favored by pros- including 120 and 70mm, and 4x5-in., as
well as 35mm.
A long term threat to Photo CD is electronic cameras. True,
current filmless imaging cameras already on the market are bedeviled
by either high prices or unacceptably low resolutions. But in five to
ten years, when solid state memories and higher capacity sensors
become available, electrnic film cameras could give Photo CD a run
for its money.
Kodak competitors have been slow to respond to the Photo CD
challenge, content to sit on the sidelines and let Kodak take the
lead- and the risks.
A few are even "supporting" Photo CD, including film
producers Fuji and Agfa-Gevaert that will offer PIW equipment to
photo finishers overseas for converting their own proprietary film
into Photo CD format.
At least for starters, Kodak seems to have the Phoo CD field
largely all to itself, with the computer graphics professionals
having the opportunity to call many of the shots- at least,
initially.
(Stanley Klein and Malcolm Stiefel have co-authored articlces for
many years, for Computer Pictures and other publications. Klein is
publisher/editor of the S. Klein Newsletter on Computer Graphics.
Stiefel is a computer scientist at Mitre Corp.)
--
mfolivo@sactoh0.SAC.CA.US SAC-UNIX (916) 649-0161
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