| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : FEBRUARY 1, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
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| TECHNOLOGY & YOU
Digital Snapshots in a Snap Several new devices let you view and manipulate photos with less hassle One of the big attractions of digital photography is the gratification of seeing your pictures as quickly as you take them. But looking at the tiny, low-resolution preview screen on the back of most cameras isn't very satisfying. And getting images into a computer for viewing involves painfully slow transfers and often cranky software. The Photo Jetprinter 5770 from Lexmark International (LXK) (800 539-6275 or www.lexmark.com) offers a novel solution. The Jetprinter looks like a typical inkjet printer for use with a Windows PC. Like other printers optimized for photo work, it uses five color inks (plus black) instead of the usual three. CARD GAME. But the Jetprinter has a neat trick up its sleeve. Most digital cameras use either a CompactFlash or SmartMedia memory card to store pictures. In the Jetprinter, you take the card out of the camera and insert it in a slot. A six-button control panel and a one-line LCD display allow you to select pictures for printing and pick a size. You can even do some crude cropping. The process is easiest if you have previewed your shots in the camera's viewer. But if your camera doesn't have a display or you can't remember which shot is which, don't despair. The printer can generate a page, rather like a photographer's contact sheet, with thumbnail images of all your pictures. Many camera makers offer dedicated printers that can also read memory cards directly and print out snapshot-size images. But these devices lack the versatility of the Jetprinter, which can also be used in the conventional way to print photos that have been computer-edited with such programs as Adobe PhotoDeluxe and Microsoft Picture It! The Windows-only printer also produces standard text and graphics. Sony Corp.'s (SNE) Mavica digital cameras offer a different solution to the image-transfer problem. Instead of using memory cards, the Mavicas store pictures on ordinary floppy disks, which can then be inserted in your computer in normal fashion. I tried a $999 MVC-FD91, a high-end camera whose features and controls--including electronic image stabilization--will strike a still-camera user as odd but seem familiar to owners of one of Sony's popular camcorders. The problem is that the abilities of the camera outstrip the capacity of the floppy. At its highest-quality setting, the Mavica can get just one image on a disk. To make the concept work with high-resolution cameras, Sony has to find a bigger storage medium. SHARE WARE. The $500 ImageDeck from Microtek International (800 654-4160 or www.microtek.com) deals with a different problem. It's a freestanding scanner that can save a photograph, image, or text for optical character recognition directly to a floppy or Zip disk, or send it to an attached printer. Hooking a scanner up to a PC is less hassle than it once was, and for a single user, paying $400 over the price of a regular 600-dot-per-inch scanner probably isn't worth it. But the ImageDeck is ideal for use in a small office or a department. Here's why: Unlike printers, scanners cannot readily be shared over a network. But the free-standing ImageDeck makes it easy for several people to use one scanner, then move the image on disk to their own computers for further processing or storage. One thing all of these devices share is an emphasis on ease of use and an avoidance of the often complex job of hooking accessories up to computers. That alone makes them welcome additions. BY STEPHEN H. WILDSTROM _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
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