CompuServe Messages

Tim, It takes a couple of seconds to draw a picture…no big deal, and I'm not sure if it has to do that…it may be able to frame buffer and jump from one to the next. A local dealer here will take a negative and put it on the disk for $1.25 each in lots of 1 to 10 negatives. If you go in with a full 100 negatives (or slides) it drops to about $0.85 a negative. The Disk itself is free (from this dealer anyway) and it's only a few dollars to develop a roll of film. The presumption is that you don't want every snapshot you take put on the CD…just your better ones. And, of course, you don't need a whole CD everytime you want to add a picture or two, they can be "appended" to a current CD until it's full (100 pictures). So you could have 1 a week added for two years before you'd need a new disk itself. I strongly suspect those prices will come down as PhotoCD unit sales volumn goes up. Just like everything else. And yes, I suspect there's more than a bit of 'Gillette Shaver' philosophy involved. Sell the player for minimal margin, make your profits on the dealer processors (that add the pictures to the CD) and the process itself. Gillette did the same thing years ago…almost gave the shavers away (and in many cases…did)…but made tons of profit on the blades to go in the shavers. Don