digital image-making

Picture CD to revolutionise digital image-making

THE self-proclaimed har

binger of the next revolu tion arrived inauspi ciously late and in the back of a dark brown delivery truck.

Coddled in thick bubble wrap was a new piece of technology whose makers claim will revolutionise the way people take more than 80 billion photographs each year world-wide.

The new Picture CD - jointly launched by Kodak, Intel and Adobe systems promises to be one of the most useful bits of consumer technology announced.

Due to be released next year and cur rently on a trail run in the United States, the software aims to introduce ordinary photographers to the dramatic new possi bilities of digital image-making.

This is one of those high-tech sectors that no one ever dreamed of needing before they were invented. Digital cam eras, for all their high-tech features, have

hardly made a splash in the camera mar ket, accounting for only about one per cent of sales since the start of the year.

Their appeal has largely been more to "techies” than to serious photographers who find that bits and bytes cannot equal the picture quality of traditional film.

News photographers - professionals who need digital images to send to their papers - prefer to scan their traditional negatives for e-mail rather than taking digital photos to start with.

Retail outlets have also been largely unimpressed with the response to new ser vices allowing customers to get their pho tos developed both on print and a floppy disc.

But according to industry observers, the new picture disk will change the way most people feel about high-tech pictures and will mark an important step into mak ing digital imaging as übiquitous as com puters themselves. ■