The D30 is, however, a lot of digital camera for the money. In fact, the D30 -- from Canon U.S.A. Inc. of Lake Success, N.Y. -- is shaping up to offer more for your digital photography dollar than any digital SLR since, well, the Nikon D1. If the image quality is as good as Canon promises, then its feature set and software, combined with a street price of about $3000, will make the D30 an appealing option for newspapers with smaller budgets and lots of Canon gear, as well as the thousands of Canon-toting free-lance news shooters eager to make the move to digital. Canon has built just enough pro features into the D30 to make many a photojournalist sit up and take notice.

The D30 should be shipping worldwide by the time you read this.

As expected, Canon didn't reveal a pro digital SLR at Photokina, though Canon Germany reps were talking openly about an early-2001 introduction. That's consistent with the message from Canon USA over the last several months. Canon SLR shooters will have to satisfy their digital needs with the Kodak DCS 520 and EOS D30 for a while longer.

Nikon didn't reveal a replacement for the D1 digital SLR, nor was one really expected. Look to February's PMA trade show as the next opportunity for Nikon Inc. of Melville, N.Y., to unveil a follow-up to the D1.

The scanners
Film is still the medium onto which innumerable newspaper and wire service photo assignments are recorded. Because of that, a good quality analog-to-digital converter is required to move film into a computer for editing, transmission and storage. For most photojournalists, that converter is a 35mm film scanner. At Photokina 2000, several companies had their 35mm film scanners on display, including Minolta, plus -- in Polaroid's case -- an advance look was offered at a new multiformat film scanner that delivers high-resolution scans and connects via the high-speed computer interface FireWire, making it the first FireWire film scanner on the market.

The most impressive scanner on show at Photokina 2000 wasn't particularly new, flashy or even popular among news photographers. The scanner I'm referring to is the Minolta Dimage Scan Elite, and for a reason I'll delve into below, I believe it absolutely should be considered for purchase against comparable Nikon, Polaroid or Canon film scanners.

Shortly after my son Fergus was born last year, I borrowed a Nikon LS-2000 to scan some of the color and black-and-white negatives of his first few weeks of life. What a disappointment. Regardless of how I set up the scanning software (disabling sharpening, for instance), the scans from the low-ISO film all had the same unwelcome property: they were unacceptably grainy.

Comparing an Epson inkjet print from a film scan with a traditional print, the difference was extreme: four-by-six and eight-by-10 prints from my local photofinisher were sharp, with good contrast, tone and minimal apparent grain. The same frames scanned on the LS-2000 and printed on an Epson Stylus Photo EX printer were equally sharp, and had pleasant color, tone and contrast, but a pronounced graininess dominated background areas in particular.

I tried the usual tricks, including liberal use of Adobe Photoshop's Despeckle filter, but I wasn't able to match the traditional prints' high sharpness and low graininess combo. As a result, I trundled off to the photofinisher for more reprints and enlargements, abandoning my plan to make Epson prints for family and friends.

Several months later I fired up Canon's Canoscan FS2710 and found it to be no less of a grain enhancer than the LS-2000. While the overall image quality from both the Canon and Nikon scanners was fine, I wouldn't want to use either on a daily basis to scan important photos because of how they seem to exaggerate film grain.

An article in the British photo magazine Photon several years back first twigged me to the grain problem of certain film scanners. In the magazine's comparison of several desktop units, it was easy to see that Minolta's now-discontinued Quickscan 35 Plus offered comparable smoothness to the drum scanner the author used as a reference, and that the other brands tested didn't measure up in this regard.

In a chance conversation shortly before Photokina 2000, a drum scanner expert made exactly the same observation about desktop film scanners and grain, and suggested the Scan Elite from Minolta Corp. of Ramsey, N.J., was worth checking out, primarily because its scans did not exhibit this characteristic.

With that in mind, I persuaded Minolta's booth staff at Photokina to fire up the Dimage Scan Elite for me. The results were as I'd hoped: two scans, one from an ISO 100 color negative and the other from an ISO 400 black-and-white negative, showed great sharpness and minimal grain enhancement, regardless of the scanner software's settings.

The relative prominence of grain in a scan should not be the sole determinant in selecting a scanner, of course. The point of this tale is really to encourage those of you about to purchase a 35mm film scanner to include the Minolta Dimage Scan Elite on your short list of scanners to buy. The smoothness of its scans may surprise you.

Photojournalist Heimo Aga alerted me to the Polaroid SprintScan 120's unveiling at Photokina 2000, and I'm glad he did. Capable of scanning from 35mm through to six-by-nine centimeter formats, with connections for both SCSI-2 and FireWire, it could be a good choice for photo departments needing both 35mm and medium format scanning capabilities, along with what Polaroid Corp. of Cambridge, Mass., claims is the highest resolution in a medium format scanner, at 4000 dpi.

If the scan quality is good (I wasn't able to view scans from this unit at Photokina), the SprintScan 120 could give Imacon's line of medium format desktop drum scanners a run for their money, since the SprintScan is expected to be less expensive. If you've ever used an Imacon scanner from Imacon Inc. of Fremont, Calif., however, you know that it produces dynamite scans, so the Polaroid scanner will have to work hard to match Imacon's quality.

Polaroid staff would offer only ballpark street price estimates of between 8000 DM and 10,000 DM ($US3600 to $US4500) for the SprintScan 120. The scanner is expected to ship late this year or early next.

Imaging software
When the D1 began to ship late last year, it quickly became clear that the included Nikon View DX software was not suitable for efficient browsing of the camera's JPEG files. Enter FotoStation 4.0 from Fotoware A.S. of Oslo, Norway. The image browser then offered most of what photojournalists needed, including clear thumbnails, batch captioning and good integration with Photoshop. This was, for North American photographers especially, an introduction to a Norwegian program that had already been in wide use for several years at newspapers on the other side of the Atlantic.

But FotoStation 4.0 is not Fotoware's flagship application. That honor is bestowed on FotoStation Pro 4.0. The Pro version includes all the features of the standard version, plus a raft of industrial-strength image management features that make it the mainstay of photo departments across Scandinavia, and elsewhere.

The Pro version is about to be revved to 4.5, where the most significant change is under the hood: the entire code base has been rewritten to use Apple's QuickTime software to handle the display of photos being browsed and previewed. This means that any format that QuickTime can handle, either by itself or with the assistance of a QuickTime plug-in, FotoStation Pro 4.5 on both Mac and Windows platforms will be able to handle as well.

JPEG and TIFF support is still there, as it was before, but file formats such as MP3, QuickTime VR and Ipix can now be browsed, IPTC captioned (Mac, Windows NT/2000 only) and previewed, all from within FotoStation Pro 4.5. All that's required is that files be in a format that either QuickTime or an installed QuickTime plug-in can understand. Support for the upcoming JPEG 2000 standard should be quick and easy to add to FotoStation Pro 4.5, said Photoware's Chief Executive Officer Ole Christian Frenning, simply by loading a JPEG 2000 QuickTime plug-in.

Version 4.5 will also support web-based file uploading. With the appropriate switch flipped in a newspaper's web server software, FotoStation Pro 4.5 will enable a photographer to select a group of files, choose a menu command, select the destination server from a pre-configured popup list, then move on to other things as the files transmit across the Internet.

Fotoware hasn't yet announced which, if any, features from the Pro version of 4.5 will make it into a revamped standard version.

There are many ways to squeeze a high-resolution photo enough to permit quick transmission and efficient storage. The dominant method is JPEG compression (JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group, which was the party of mathematicians to create the compression scheme). So dominant is JPEG that it's safe to say that more digital SLR images ends up as Jfif or Exif format Jpegs (JPEG, strictly speaking, is a compression method, not a file format; we won't even try to explain Jfif or Exif) than anything else.

There are, however, two other approaches to compressing a photo that are gaining in popularity: fractal and wavelet. Genuine Fractals from Altamira Group Inc. of Burbank, Calif., uses fractal geometry to encode an image. While it offers only moderate compression rates, it is often the best choice for scaling digital SLR photos to the resolutions required for poster-size and larger printing (at standard enlargement sizes, fractal scaling is often no better than Photoshop on its own). Wavelet compression, on the other hand, is purpose-built to provide greater compression of photos than is possible with either discrete cosine transformation compression (JPEG, in other words) or fractal encoding, while still retaining good quality. The emerging JPEG 2000 standard employs wavelet-based compression.

But it isn't necessary to wait for JPEG 2000 to go wavelet. Products from two companies are available right now that can compress photos in a manner similar to that of JPEG 2000. One of the companies, the German firm Luratech Inc., which has U.S. offices in Menlo Park, Calif., showed off its wares at Photokina 2000. The company includes $79 Photoshop plug-ins for Mac and Windows that include lossless or lossy wavelet compression, producing files in the Lurawave (LWF) format.

The other company that dominates in the wavelet arena is Seattle-based Lizardtech Inc. which has two products of interest to photographers: a $249 plug-in for Mac versions of Photoshop called MrSID Photoshop Edition, and a free (or $49 for commercial use) stand-alone application for Windows called MrSID Photo Edition. Both provide wavelet compression and decompression.

If you wish to get a head start on wavelet compression before the advent of JPEG 2000, either Lizardtech's or Luratech's products will allow you to do just that. While I haven't spent a great deal of time comparing wavelet to regular JPEG compression, it's clear to me already that for moderate compression rates (10:1, 20:1, for example), regular JPEG can just about hold its own. For extreme image shrinkage that will enable speedy transmission over slow satellite phone or mobile phone links, wavelet compression easily bests JPEG.

Of course, wavelet compression won't move beyond its current niche status in pro photography until it's directly supported by Photoshop. And that isn't going to happen until the JPEG 2000 standard is locked down. JPEG 2000 should be formally ratified as a standard in December, at which time Adobe will begin to feel the pressure to release a JPEG 2000 file format plug-in for its pro image editing application.

Speaking of Photoshop from Adobe Systems Inc. of San Jose, the latest version -- Adobe Photoshop 6 -- is a vast revamp of the industry standard imaging application. Watching as Adobe reps rip through its enhanced text and layers effects and controls, it's hard not to get a bit dizzy. That's because the results, and how one achieves them, are that cool.

The apparent changes that will benefit a daily news shooter or a pre-press technician are fewer and farther between. Changes include:

File Info is unchanged; the same fields in the same arrangement with the same limited ability to apply any sort of batch IPTC info exists in Photoshop 6. All in all, Photoshop 6 is an upgrade aimed at web and graphic designers, and needn't be considered a must-have upgrade for news shooters in particular.

-- Rob Galbraith, galbraith@colepapers.net

Adobe Systems Inc.,
(408) 536-6000;
Altamira Group Inc.,
(818) 556-6099;
Canon U.S.A. Inc.,
(516) 488-6700;
Eastman Kodak Co.,
(800) 235-6325;
Fotoware A.S.,
e-mail: webmaster@fotoware.com;
Imacon Inc.,
(510) 651-2000;
LizardTech Inc.,
(206) 652-5211,
e-mail: info@lizardtech.com;
LuraTech Inc.,
(650) 326-8829,
e-mail: info@luratech.com;
Minolta Corp.,
(201) 825-4000;
Nikon Inc.,
(800) 645-6687;
Polaroid Corp.,
(781) 386-2000.

From THE COLE PAPERS, November 2000, Copyright © 2000, All Rights Reserved.