With the serious emergence of digital photography comes that old chestnut ‘standards’, and nine companies, including Eastman Kodak Co, Microsoft Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co have formed an industry group, the Digital Imaging Group, to jointly develop software and technology for digital photography. The group’s mission is to ensure that digital camera makers, photo-editing software vendors and other equipment makers all use the same standards. It will own the FlashPix standard, co-developed by Kodak, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, which specifies how cameras and software will handle digital photographs. The other six founder members are Adobe Systems Inc, Canon Inc, Fuji Photo Film Co, IBM Corp, Intel Corp and LivePicture Inc. It is believed at least 18 more companies, including Polaroid Corp, will join the group. Intel made a move to promote standards for connecting digital cameras to personal computers earlier this year (CI No 3,214), publishing a design guideline, the Portable PC Camera ’98 Guide which was backed by many of the new group’s members.
