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                                                                                TECHNOLOGY, Page 58

Can You Picture This?


Kodak's new Photo CD system offers casual shutterbugs their
first glimpse of a revolution that is sweeping the world of
photography

By PHILIP ELMER-DEWITT/CAMDEN

    Starting this month, Americans taking their vacation
snapshots to be developed will be offered a choice that may seem
mystifying. In addition to the usual range of options -- from
color slides to jumbo prints -- they will be invited to have
their pictures scanned by a computer and stored on a "Photo CD"
-- a compact disc that looks just like one that might play the
latest Guns N' Roses release but in fact stores all the shots
of the kids and the Grand Canyon in digital form. These
newfangled photo albums hold up to 100 images, stored for a fee
of about $1 a frame. They can be viewed, without risk of fading
or fraying, on an ordinary television set using a special CD
player.

    Eastman Kodak is betting that Photo CDs will eventually
become as familiar to photographers around the world as its
bright yellow boxes of film. It has succeeded in persuading such
competitors as Fuji, Agfa and Konica to agree to one standard
for the discs, although Kodak is first to offer the product.
What the company envisions is a future in which devices that
play Photo CDs -- which also double as music CD players -- have
become standard equipment in home entertainment centers,
alongside the stereo, the TV and the VCR. Kodak pictures
families gathered in living rooms to see photos displayed on TV
screens -- and, eventually, on high-resolution HDTV.

    The more creative photographers will have the chance to
load Photo CD images into home computers and turn their Macs
and PCs into electronic darkrooms, where they can create
studio-quality pictures that might be printed on color printers,
turned into Christmas cards or sent to friends and relatives
over ordinary phone lines. Adventurous types will even be able
to manipulate the digitized images, pixelediting crazy Uncle
Harry out of a shot, for example, or grafting his head onto
Fido's body.

    It could, however, be a tough sell. Few Americans own
computers powerful enough to manipulate images, and even fewer
have the equipment needed to retrieve pictures stored on a
compact disc (a Philips CD Interactive system will do it, as
will some CD-ROM computer drives). Kodak sells a $400 Photo CD
player that reads both music and photographic compact discs, but
until such devices are widely used, the company is likely to be
caught in a classic chicken-and-egg marketing bind: people won't
want to spend $25 to have their pictures put on a disc they
cannot play, and few will want to buy the player without a
library of discs to view.

    Still, there is something about the Kodak idea that has
the aura of inevitability. Photo CD is the public's first
glimpse of a technological revolution that has been developing
for more than a decade. Like music, text and telephones,
photography is going digital. What was once a purely chemical
process -- by which crystals of silver halide were exposed to
light and turned into visual representations (or analogs) of an
actual scene -- is being transformed into an electronic process
that turns the same information into strings of 0s and 1s.

    The pictures may look the same -- at least to the
untrained eye. Purists point out that Photo CD images contain
only about 18 million pixels (picture elements), which is
roughly equivalent to the visual information represented by the
20 million silver molecules in a standard 35-mm negative. But
that is about one-fifth the resolution offered by high-quality
Kodachrome slides, and it cannot compare with the glorious
large-format pictures that Ansel Adams labored to create.

    The main advantage will be that hundreds of digital images
can be stored on an optical disk and sorted in a flash. They
can be recopied endlessly, each new image a perfect replica of
the old. They can be transmitted anywhere in the world at
nearly the speed of light. And they can be called to a computer
screen and cropped, tinted, sharpened or shaded on the fly,
giving photo editors at their workstations a taste of the power
that writers sitting at their word processors have enjoyed for
years.

    The same technology permits businesses and government
agencies to replace rooms full of documents with stacks of
computer disks. American Express converts all its paper receipts
into digital form for printing and storage. Empire Blue Cross
& Blue Shield in New York City uses the process to make digital
images of 250,000 claims a day. Even police departments are
beginning to use the technology for storing mug shots and
fingerprints. Digital-image management is already a $1.8 billion
industry, and could grow to $11 billion in North America by
1996, according to BIS Strategic Decisions, a
Massachusetts-based consulting firm.

    In the hands of an artist, the tools of digital imaging
offer a whole new creative medium -- one that combines the
realism of photography with the malleability of oil paints. Once
an image is converted to digital form, it can be loaded into a
computer and manipulated by any number of software tools. Spots
and blemishes can be erased or smoothed over. Shadows can be
deepened or lightened. Images can be cloned, combined,
sharpened or blurred and then painted from a palette of more
than 16 million hues. The final product can be put to paper on
a new generation of color printers that spit out enlargements
nearly indistinguishable from those created in a darkroom.

    Nowhere is the power of these tools more palpable than at
Kodak's Center for Creative Imaging, a converted brass foundry
in Camden, Maine. Since the center opened last year under the
direction of Ray DeMoulin, a 38-year Kodak veteran, more than
2,000 designers, illustrators, graphic artists and professional
photographers have made the pilgrimage to immerse themselves in
the new technology. Among those who have come to play at the
center's 90 (mostly Macintosh) workstations are photographer
Richard Avedon, graphic designer Milton Glaser and illustrator
Jean-Michel Folon. (It was here that photographer Gregory
Heisler created the Ted Turner-CNN composite that illustrated
TIME's Man of the Year cover.)

    Apple Computer chairman John Sculley likes to compare the
center to Florence during the Renaissance. In truth, the
artistry, so far, is rather long on surrealistic special effects
and short on subtlety, as explorers of the medium check out
every tool in their new bag of tricks. "We're at the early
stages of what may be a paradigm shift, and a lot of this stuff
will look clunky," says Charles Altschul, a Yale design
professor who serves as the center's director of education. "But
you can feel the artists' creativity beginning to poke through."

    Much is riding on Kodak's venture into digital imaging.
Although the photo giant still dominates the market for film and
photographic paper, the long-term future of film technology is
far from certain. There are already electronic cameras on the
market, including one made by Kodak, that take digital pictures
without using film. The results look fine on a TV screen, but
the prints are of poor quality. What Photo CD does, Kodak
executives say, is give the owners of the world's 250 million
conventional film cameras the best of both technologies:
high-quality prints and low-cost input devices for the new
digital systems.