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 The Good Guys! We know our stuff Audi The Alternate Route Atari Power without the Price