News - 1/7/01

PRODUCT NEWS BRIEFS

New ways to deliver Digital Imaging continue to appear. For those with a collection of images for which there might be a market:

LookClickPrint, Inc. has a system which combines New Mexico Software¹s image management software with high end printing. Using it on a web site, the customer can select the exact size and material on which to print the image - canvas or paper. The same customer can even order frames.

If you don't want to become a merchant, Artland.com will acquire digital rights to your images for a fee and handle the sale of art reproductions themselves.

For printing our own digital images for yourself, there are also several options.

Your local photo shop may be equipped by PhotoAccess.com. with their own online, e-commerce digital camera photo finishing center, offering customers film quality prints and photo merchandise. Of course there are the Snapfish, Ofoto and several others who will develop your film, let you and everyone else in your family select the images you want and print those images which are then mailed to you. If you can't wait for the mail, you can go to Kinkos which is teaming with Kodak¹s Picture Maker Kiosks to print those images retrieved from the Internet as you wait.

NOTE:

Printing digital images is important, because digital images are not strictly speaking Archival due to computer obsolescence. If You plan on having your digital images ten years down the road, you must plan on migrating your data. For those family, company picnic scenes which you might want to keep for history it may be safer to get them printed as film quality prints.

NEW PRODUCTS

While a great deal of commercial activity is concentrating on printing digital images, the creation process is not being ignored.

At Comdex-

Eastman Kodak CEO Daniel A. Carp called Photos the next 'killer app¹ . He demonstrated a camera ( we told you about the Photivity platform in November) with wireless connections and the new display technology called Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) that offers better quality and lower power consumption than LCDs. He also showed a watermarking system which can detect the unauthorized use of images which will be released soon.

Ricoh demonstrated its new RDC-i700 camera which can also send images over the Internet and upload directly to a site in HTML template form.

While Sanyo previewed their IDC-1000Z a combination still/video camera that uses a 730 MB 2- inch M-O disk.