Photo CD is a system designed by Kodak for digitizing and saving photos in a CD. Launched in 1992, the discs were designed to hold nearly 100 high quality images, scanned prints and slides using special proprietary encoding. Photo CDs are defined in the Beige Book and conform to the CD-ROM XA and CD-i Bridge specifications as well. They were intended to play on CD-i players, Photo CD players (Apple's PowerCD for example), and any computer with a suitable software (LaserSoft Imaging's SilverFast DC or HDR for example). The system failed to gain mass usage among consumers partly due to its proprietary nature, the rapid decline in the costs of scanners, and the lack of CD-ROM drives in most home personal computers of the day. The Photo CD system gained a fair level of acceptance among professional photographers due to the low cost of the high quality film scans. Prior to Photo CD, professionals who wished to digitize their film images were forced to pay much higher fees to obtain drum scans of their film negatives and transparencies. Photo CD was replaced by Picture CD, also from Kodak.
| Designation | Resolution | Uncompressed Size | Intended typical use | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| (px × px) | (Mpx) | (MB) | ||
| Base/16 | 128 × 192 | 0.025 | 0.07 | Preview (index print, thumbnail) |
| Base/4 | 256 × 384 | 0.098 | 0.28 | Web |
| Base | 512 × 768 | 0.393 | 1.13 | Computer screen, TV, Web |
| 4 Base | 1024 × 1536 | 1.573 | 4.50 | HDTV screen |
| 16 Base | 2048 × 3072 | 6.291 | 18.00 | Print-out up to ca. 20 x 30 cm |
| 64 Base | 4096 × 6144 | 25.166 | 72.00 | Professional print, pre-press, archiving (optional) |
Read more about Photo CD: Variants, History, Backing Up and Archiving Photo CD Images, Converting Photo CD Images
Famous quotes containing the word photo:
“A photo of someone else’s childhood,
a garden in another country—world
he had no part in and has no power to imagine:
yet the old man who has failed his memory
keens over the picture— ‘Them happy days—
gone—gone for ever!’”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)