Word: kodak
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
...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...
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...
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...
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...