Eastman Kodak Co’s energetic campaign to promote its Photo CD system for transferring photographic film negative images onto compact disk has won another adherent in the shape of Apple Computer Inc, which has agreed to work with Kodak on integrating support for Photo CD images into future versions of Apple’s QuickTime system software extension. Apple says that QuickTime support for the digital imaging technology will provide graphic designers, desktop publishers and multimedia producers with direct access to Photo CD images within Macintosh application software. It reckons that QuickTime is the only architecture that can support all industry standard image compression schemes in a seamless manner, and that the new development will offer users easy access to high-quality images from within any existing Macintosh application. Apple plans to license the Photo CD technology from Kodak and make it directly accessible in QuickTime so that users will simply click on a Photo CD icon to access thumbnail versions of images stored on Photo CD disks. The current AppleCD SC Plus can read single-session Photo CD disks, and Apple will enhance its drive for Photo CD; Photo CD support will be in the next release of QuickTime.
