Eastman Kodak Co has announced that Philips NV’s Philips Consumer Electronics Co, Pioneer Electronics Corp’s Pioneer Communications, Sony Corp and Toshiba Corp will offer Photo CD-compatible CD-ROM drives. These CD-ROM drives will use the features of Photo CD technology, says Kodak, and the manufacturers will be allowed to brand their products with the Photo CD logo and to co-market the technology with Kodak. Photo CD compatibility involves multi-session support, which is incorporated in the CD-ROM Mode 2 data storage standard developed by Sony and Philips. Photo CD technology – a joint development from Philips and Kodak for enabling photographs to be stored on compact disk for playback and manipulation on the television by Photo CD players and Philips CD-I players – is writable as well as readable; images can be read onto the compact disk at different times, or in multiple sessions. The multisession feature also enables text and audio to be added to Photo CD images at the photofinisher, for application in business presentations and the like. The text and audio support will be available on players, beginning with the first shipments this summer, and from photofinishers also sometime later this year. And, as reported, Kodak has also announced that it is working with Apple Computer Inc to integrate support for Photo CD images into future versions of Apple’s QuickTime system software extension (CI No 1,881). Terms of the co-operative agreement were not disclosed. QuickTime support for Kodak’s digital image technology will provide Apple-based graphics designers, desktop publishers and multimedia producers with direct access to Photo CD images within Macintosh application software. Apple plans to license the Photo CD technology from Kodak and make it directly accessible in QuickTime, so that users just click on a Photo CD icon to access tiny versions of images stored on Photo CD compact disks. The images can then be integrated directly into applications used to create multimedia titles, presentations and publications that combine video, animation and photo-quality still images. QuickTime is a Macintosh system software extension that enables third-party developers to integrate dynamic media – sound, video and animation. It supports data compression algorithms JPEG, Photo CD, Intel Corp’s Digital Video Interactive, MPEG, motion JPEG, Group III facsimile and custom compression.
