FASTER, SHARPER IMAGES FOR THE WEB Have you thought about selling your widgets on the Web but hate the fuzziness of Web pictures? Think again. A new program called FlashPix is about to make its way to a computer near you. With it, customers and prospects can see your widgets close-up -- and print them out without feeling like they're looking through frosted glass. FlashPix, developed by Hewlett Packard, Eastman Kodak, Microsoft, and LivePicture Inc., is already built into the latest versions of photo-editing software such as Microsoft's Picture It! and LivePicture's LivePix. But even if you don't yet own one of these products, you can see a demonstration of how FlashPix works at Hewlett Packard's Imaging for Internet site (http://image.hp.com). The downloadable software is really a new file format that lets Web users see, print, and distribute high-resolution images across the Internet. Those images can be viewed across different hardware platforms. Most important, the file format shrinks download times while sharpening image close-ups. How does it work? High-resolution images in other formats are sent whole across the wire -- which is why it seems to take hours for them to downolad. By contrast, images in FlashPix format are broken up in pieces. When you use the zoom tools to focus in on a corner of the picture, the server downloads only the portion you're after. Under a section called "Getting Started," The Imaging for Internet site gives the complete instructions for downloading and installing FlashPix. Once you've captured the software, you can click on four demonstration areas: HP co-founder Bill Hewlett's photos of flowers; Automobile Magazine's cutaway illustrations of the 1997 Corvette; Express Direct's/DiAMAR's photos of historic places; or PhotoDisc's sites in Washington, D.C. When you click on a picture, a toolbar appears with four icons: two magnifying glasses for zooming and focusing the image, a hand icon for panning, and an options button that lets you save the image. You can view the picture without the interminable wait for the screen to paint it, even if your computer isn't the speediest. When you print the image, the result looks crisp and clear. Anastasia Lis, a marketing director of Accident Inc., a five-person company that designs custom neckties in Schaumburg, Ill., says her company gets lots of queries from people via the Internet, but that in the past, the lack of fine detail in the image got in the way. "You couldn't get a sense of what the fabric is like by looking at the picture on a Web site," she says. With FlashPix, though, Lis's Web customers will be able to see the color and texture of a piece of material. How can your business use FlashPix? Lis, for example, can scan an image of a necktie, edit the image with Microsoft Picture It! or LivePicture's LivePix, and upload the image to her Web site. To see the FlashPix files, customers will have to click on a hotlink to download the software from the HP site, a small hassle. But future versions of Web browsers, like Netscape, will have FlashPix built in. When that happens, we'll all be seeing things a little more clearly. By Bronwyn Fryer in Santa Cruz, Calif. Return to main story

Updated June 15, 1997 by bwwebmaster
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