Word: compacts
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...shift to digital entertainment media, which began with compact discs in the 1980s, will open up new dimensions in leisure. Nicholas Negroponte, director of M.I.T.'s Media Laboratory, predicts the availability, before the end of the next century, of "full-color, large-scale, holographic TV with force feedback and olfactory output," which is to say, home movies that can be seen, felt and smelled. The trend will be toward entertainment that is customized for the individual, including do-it-yourself multimedia fantasies as well as newspapers and magazines edited to suit each subcriber's interests...
...offers both advantages and disadvantages. It all depends on where you stand. American manufacturers generally like a lower dollar because it slashes the cost of their products overseas and thus helps exports. For example, Ford expects the low exchange rate to boost sales of its new right-hand-drive compact, the Probe, which it plans to ship to Japan. A cheap dollar, however, increases inflation because U.S. consumers have to pay more for such foreign goods as Louis Vuitton luggage or Hermes scarves. A declining currency is also seen as a vote of no- confidence by foreign investors...
...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...
...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...
TECHNOLOGY: Photo Albums on Compact Discs...