Apple of its eye

MIAMI -- Many people got their first exposure to Apple's new digital camera at Digital '94.

Apple Computer Inc. had announced the QuickTake 100 point-and-shoot digital camera at the Tokyo MacWorld Expo in February, to basically a different crowd.

The camera, which lists for $749, captures 24-bit color pictures with a CCD (charge-coupled device) made by Eastman Kodak.

The images come in two resolutions -- 320 x 240 pixels or 640 x 480 pixels (53 picas by 43 picas at 72 dpi). The camera can store 32 of the lower resolution pictures or eight of the higher resolution.

The QuickTake comes with a cable and software package that allows users to send pictures to a Macintosh (Windows connectivity is due in June, Apple has said).

The software lets users control the camera from a Mac, view thumbnails, and crop, rotate and scale the pictures. It also handles compression, which uses QuickTime algorithms.

Pictures can be saved in TIFF, Pict and JPEG-Pict formats.

As a point-and-shoot camera, it has a fixed focus that Apple says ranges from 4 feet to infinity. The company says the lens has a focal length similar to a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera.

The camera weighs in at one pound and uses three AA batteries. It also has a built-in electronic flash; the shutter speed is automatically controlled from .0057 to .033 of a second.

Apple wanted to demonstrate the camera during Digital '94's opening session, but the camera's product manager couldn't make it work.

A mock demonstration was put on instead, with pictures shot before the conference transmitted to a server in New York. Unfortunately, the transmission was halted before the audience could see how long it took to complete.

QuickTake was shown on the conference's trade show floor, though. Photo Systems Inc. of Dexter, Mich., had obtained one to shoot pictures of passersby at the show. Thomas Halfacer of PSI took the picture to the left.

The image started out as a 1.2 megabyte color file; using an image manipulation program, we discarded the color information and scaled it to 185-dpi, the standard we use for our 120-line screen reproduction.

As with any picture destined for ink-on-paper, we lightened up the image just a bit. The resulting image occupied 195 kilobytes. It is reproduced here at full size.

Photo Systems Inc., (800) 521-4042.

-- dmc

From THE COLE PAPERS, April 1994, Copyright (c) 1994, All Rights Reserved.