Howard Brainen
Two Cat Digital

I do want to make a correction about Kodak and the Photo CD systems, since my company is very closely involved with this.

The equipment that is no longer being manufactured includes the original 2000 and 4045 scanners that first came out almost ten years ago. The 2000 scanner is for 35mm only and is used with a Sun Sparcstation computer, running Kodak's PIW software, to produce Master Photo CD's. The 4045 (and its current replacement, the 4050) are for Pro Photo CD scanning of 35mm, 120 and 4x5 film. These larger scanners can be used with Macs as well as Sun Sparcstations to produce Photo CD's.

Kodak discontinued manufacturing the 2000 scanner over 5 years ago, and is running out of parts. So it is true that eventually the use of these scanners will stop as parts run out. Our first 2000 scanner has been running five to seven days a week for almost ten years, so I can assure you these are very robust machines. But since Kodak cannot promise parts CHANGE IN THIS LINE availability forever, we have purchased three more complete systems in the past few months. This will dramatically increase our capacity, but it will also buy us several years of parts availability if we need it.

There is a new Photo CD scanning system now on the market. Kodak has licensed the technology to DDA (Durst Dice America) in Chicago. They are offering labs a system that will scan 35mm and 120 film to Master and Portfolio Photo CD. It is not as fast as the 2000 scanner, but runs on modern computers (Windows NT boxes) and there will be parts availability for many years to come. In fact, this is the "next generation" Photo CD system and it will help Kodak assure a solid future for the Photo CD Image Pac format and disc that has proven so valuable in digitizing large image archives.