FlashPix: Son of Photo CD?
If you're at all au courant with the state of digital imaging, you've doubtless heard plenty of hoopla about FlashPix, the new digital file format developed by Live Picture Inc. and heavily touted by the newly constituted "digital imaging group." (This nonprofit industry consortium, announced at October's Seybold San Francisco, is so cutting-edge it insists on being lower-cased except when going by its acronym, the DIG.)
The DIG was the brainchild of Eastman Kodak Co., Hewlett-Packard Co., Microsoft Corp. and, of course, Live Picture. The group has now swelled to include Adobe Systems Inc., Canon U.S.A. Inc., Fuji Photo Film USA Inc., IBM Corp. and Intel Corp., and nearly 20 other companies - a veritable who's who of digital imaging - have signed letters of intent to join.
Not your grandma's format
All this for a file format? Somehow, the effort seems disproportionate. Nevertheless, the buzz does help disguise the fact that FlashPix has been a Kodak initiative right from the start. In fact, from here, it looks a lot like Kodak is making the same mistake with FlashPix as it did with Photo CD.
Cast your mind back to the early days of Photo CD. You'll recall that Kodak positioned it as a consumer product that would let everyday nontechie types (grandmothers were frequently mentioned) watch still photographs on their TV sets. Kodak even made a Photo CD player that would plug into the TV as well as play regular audio CDs. (I think I know almost everyone who bought one on a first-name basis.)
No one outside Rochester, N.Y., seemed particularly surprised when consumers made it clear they weren't even slightly interested in watching static images on TV sets. Instead, Photo CD found other niches: As far as I can tell, the Photo CD market today is about one-third image archiving, one-third prepress and one-third soft-core porn for the Southeast Asian market.
Fast-forward to FlashPix, which is, according to acting DIG President Rob Aronoff, intended as a universal platform for representing, storing, manipulating, transmitting and exchanging images. When you read between the lines, the grandma scenario raises its head again; current implementations of FlashPix and its accompanying Internet Imaging Protocol are clearly aimed at the consumer market. In fact, if you visit DIG's Web page (http://www.digitalimaging.org) you'll find a quote from a Microsoft person claiming that "FlashPix makes working with images as fast and easy as working with text."
Don't believe the hype
Having tried working with FlashPix images online, the charitable explanation for this quote is either dyslexia or an experience of the Internet that's limited to T1 lines. FlashPix has considerable promise: It's a fairly open pyramid-sampling file format that in theory supports several different methods of compression and several different methods of embedding metric color information.
The current implementation, however, seems limited to JPEG compression and the wretched lowest-common-denominator sRGB color space, which make it largely useless for pro work. Moreover, the bandwidth simply isn't there to give consumers a satisfying FlashPix experience. In short: Photo CD all over again.
Bruce Fraser welcomes correspondence at bruce@pixelboyz.com.
If you're at all au courant with the state of digital imaging, you've doubtless heard plenty of hoopla about FlashPix, the new digital file format developed by Live Picture Inc. and heavily touted by the newly constituted "digital imaging group." (This nonprofit industry consortium, announced at October's Seybold San Francisco, is so cutting-edge it insists on being lower-cased except when going by its acronym, the DIG.)
The DIG was the brainchild of Eastman Kodak Co., Hewlett-Packard Co., Microsoft Corp. and, of course, Live Picture. The group has now swelled to include Adobe Systems Inc., Canon U.S.A. Inc., Fuji Photo Film USA Inc., IBM Corp. and Intel Corp., and nearly 20 other companies - a veritable who's who of digital imaging - have signed letters of intent to join.
Not your grandma's format
All this for a file format? Somehow, the effort seems disproportionate. Nevertheless, the buzz does help disguise the fact that FlashPix has been a Kodak initiative right from the start. In fact, from here, it looks a lot like Kodak is making the same mistake with FlashPix as it did with Photo CD.
Cast your mind back to the early days of Photo CD. You'll recall that Kodak positioned it as a consumer product that would let everyday nontechie types (grandmothers were frequently mentioned) watch still photographs on their TV sets. Kodak even made a Photo CD player that would plug into the TV as well as play regular audio CDs. (I think I know almost everyone who bought one on a first-name basis.)
No one outside Rochester, N.Y., seemed particularly surprised when consumers made it clear they weren't even slightly interested in watching static images on TV sets. Instead, Photo CD found other niches: As far as I can tell, the Photo CD market today is about one-third image archiving, one-third prepress and one-third soft-core porn for the Southeast Asian market.
Fast-forward to FlashPix, which is, according to acting DIG President Rob Aronoff, intended as a universal platform for representing, storing, manipulating, transmitting and exchanging images. When you read between the lines, the grandma scenario raises its head again; current implementations of FlashPix and its accompanying Internet Imaging Protocol are clearly aimed at the consumer market. In fact, if you visit DIG's Web page (http://www.digitalimaging.org) you'll find a quote from a Microsoft person claiming that "FlashPix makes working with images as fast and easy as working with text."
Don't believe the hype
Having tried working with FlashPix images online, the charitable explanation for this quote is either dyslexia or an experience of the Internet that's limited to T1 lines. FlashPix has considerable promise: It's a fairly open pyramid-sampling file format that in theory supports several different methods of compression and several different methods of embedding metric color information.
The current implementation, however, seems limited to JPEG compression and the wretched lowest-common-denominator sRGB color space, which make it largely useless for pro work. Moreover, the bandwidth simply isn't there to give consumers a satisfying FlashPix experience. In short: Photo CD all over again.
Bruce Fraser welcomes correspondence at bruce@pixelboyz.com.