The print film-to-compact disk system announced by Eastman Kodak Co last month to combine the resolution of colour film with the ability to display digitised photographs on a television screen was just the tip of a very big iceberg, much more of which was revealed this week. The Rochester, New York company reckons that desktop colour imaging will be a $5,000m market in five years, and has now announced software packages, Photo CD development toolkit and Photo CD accessory, designed to enable software vendors, resellers and end users to work with Photo CD images. The Photo CD system stores photographs on compact disks that can be read by CD-ROM XA drives and CD-I players. It also launched a colour interchange space specification, PhotoYCC, which it hopes will be adopted as a standard to improve the way colour and colour images are represented in digital form across different output and display devices, including personal computers, televisions, laser printers and typesetters; a colour management system set of tools and utilities to provide consistent colour across devices and computer systems. There is also a new Diconix colour ink-jet printer designed to provide quality output for users of MS-DOS and Apple Macintosh computers; smaller than most video cassette recorders, it costs $1,500 for MS-DOS, $1,600 for Mac. Where it needs computer power for its products, Kodak is majoring on Sun Microsystems Sparc processors. Kodak says that it has already won support for its proposed standard from Apple Computer Inc, IBM, DEC, Hewlett-Packard Co, Lotus Development Corp, Aldus Corp and Autodesk Inc. Adobe Systems said PostScript Level 2 is to support Photo YCC; output devices will be Photo CD-compatible.
