US press reports suggest that Eastman Kodak Co will be previewing a photofinisher workstation at its Interactive Systems Corp subsidiary’s developers conference next month which is to be held at Hollywood’s Universal Studios from June 2, and Dennis Peck confirmed that a new generation of Unix-based imaging products would begin coming out of Kodak towards the end of this year, and in the first quarter of next. Kodak expects the desktop colour imaging market to be worth some $7,000m by 1993, and it wants to be prepared. It has already released Photo CD through Interactive, which enables colour images to be stored and accessed in CD format, and it is to use Interactive’s software distribution skills to push the technology onto the market. Next year, Interactive will publish both the source and documentation of System V.4 on CD-ROM, and will have a version of the package that includes a CD reader bundled in. Longer term, Interactive is planning a desktop colour imaging release of System V.4, which will include all the drivers necessary for imaging and colour peripherals, such as scanners, printers and facsimile, along with accessories and toolkits. Colour management software, which will automatically adjust colour to suit the different properties of the various peripherals and monitors attached, will also be included. The object is to tie in with local photo finishers, so that photographic quality images can be supplied and accessed on low-cost CD format and transmitted between different machines – colourspace algorithms that make this possible this have already been put into the public domain by Kodak and are part of Adobe Systems Inc’s Level-2 PostScript implementation. The image version of System V.4 will be released late in 1992 or early 1993, and will be the glue that binds together all the colour peripheral devices out there said Peck.
