Magazines may benefit from new CDs - compact disks

Eastman Kodak is targeting consumers with the nationwide rollout of its Photo CD system, but the photo giant may be surprised to find the system's best reception in the art and production department of magazines.

The Photo CD system, which begins installation this summer at selected photofinishers, will transfer up to 100 snapshots to a compact disk (in the CD-XA format). To view the pictures, the consumer must have a Photo CD player (made by Philips, N.V., and expected to retail for about $400) that connects to a television.

But an unexpected beneficiary of the technology may be magazine art departments that are beginning to add digital images to electronic page make-up. The major obstacles to incorporating photography, however, have been the investment in hardware and the time involved for scanning slides and prints into digital files. The two most popular scanners - the Leafscan 45 (at $23,995) and the Nikon LS 3510 ($8,995) - make small publishers think twice.

The Kodak Photo CD facilities to be installed in neighborhood photofinishing outlets are really mid-range pre-press operations powered by Sun workstations. Kodak anticipates charging a dollar per image for scanning to a CD, with a three-day turnaround. "This really calls into question the need for investing in a scanner at the magazine level," says Bart Wilson, Mac systems manager for Raleigh, North Carolina-based Qualex Inc., the nation's largest photofinishing chain.

At the recent Photo Marketing Association show in Las Vegas, where Photo CD was introduced, Wilson had some photographs put on a disk. When he returned to the office, he made scans of the same shots on the Leafscan 45. Using a Mac, he output the images stores on the CD to a Kodak XL-7700 digital printer and did the same for the Leafscan images. "There is some loss of shadow detail in the Photo CD images, but nothing that will show up in the 133-line screen common to most magazine reproduction," he says. The size of the image will be a factor, however, and the 18-megabyte file is not enough for a quality, full-page reproduction.

Notes Dr. Rudy Burger, president of Savitar, a color-imaging software developer in San Francisco: "Kodak may have backed into a new line of business. They could be unwittingly creating a network of inexpensive service bureaus for publishers."

Importing the images will likely be done using Adobe PhotoShop software ($795). Digital technology has all but overtaken the way typography is created at magazines. It appears that photography also is about to fall under the digital spell.

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