Photos courtesy Vincennes (Ind.) Sun-Commercial

Trade show tries to change perceptions

On the supplier floor at Digital '95, the influence of electronic distribution (and the specter of idled delivery trucks) was evident in many places.

Picture Network International Ltd. of Arlington, Va., displayed its new on-line software -- and pricing for browsing and purchasing digital images from the many agencies that sell through the service.

A new pricing mechanism addresses non-print multimedia publishing; the company worked with its clients to determine the parameters for e-pricing. Nothing is set in stone, but this type of thinking is necessary groundwork for the fully digital world.

The Scitex Resolut PS board, which was mentioned by several non-Scitex types during the digital camera session, shows interesting possibilities as a means of processing digital color images.

The $5000 board was introduced in January by Bedford, Mass.-based Scitex America Corp. It is positioned as a production tool that operates in both batch and interactive modes, providing color models for quality RGB-Cymk conversions. Customized look-up tables can support a variety of color transformations to match various input and output needs.

T/One, the Quincy, Mass.-based image technology company founded by former AP photographer Dave Tenenbaum, rolled out new enhancements to its Merlin archive system and for the first time showed its Trax assignment database.

Trax, which was co-developed with the New York Times, initiates the archiving process the instant a photo assignment is made. The request flows from the editor's daybook, through the photographer to the scanned image and into the archive.

Data supplied along the way-- photographer name, rights data, caption information -- needs to be entered only once.

The toughest hurdle for archiving to overcome is changing the industry's perception of it as a back-end, end-of-process function to one that is integral to every step along the way. Trax is a first move in that direction.

-- TAM

(703) 558-8420;

Scitex America Corp.,

(617) 275-5150;

T/One Inc.,

(617) 328-6645, e-mail: 70412.1163@compuserve.com.

Digital '95 conference

From THE COLE PAPERS, April 1995, Copyright © 1995, All Rights Reserved.