CompuServe Messages

Photo CD

    24-Aug-92 11:58:00
Sb: #25719-Photo CD
Fm: JAN SCHWENK 70053,1702
To: Mark P Will 70413,53
Mark, Your consulting business sounds interesting, Multimedia has great potential. The package was purchased at $243.76 from ComputerCITY (the new Tandy super-store in Dallas). CompUSA's price was $319. The actual retail is $495! You can also use Adobe's "PhotoShop" for the Mac ($675 from Programmer's Paradise). "Imagen" is $229 at CompUSA. "Corel Draw 3.0" is $399.99 on CD. Of course I blew up photographs to incredible size just to see what happens. At 2400% you start to see the grain a little. That enlargement takes approximately 1/4 inch square and blows it up to about 8"x10" which is far larger than you would normally want to do. I took a photograph of myself with face being less than 1/8"x1/8" and blew that up to cover my screen (it is now wall-paper on Windows–it keeps the damned cat off the keyboard). Kodak insists that it maintains all the detail of the negative. At the Kodak lab I saw an eyeball of a beautiful lady from a group photo blown up to fill a 27" screen. It is grainy because I saved it as a .BMP for only 100 lines of resolution to keep the BMP small enough to be used for wall-paper. You can actually take it up to 2000+ lines but then you get an 18MB file. I am not trying to publish my puss but if you like, I will modem that BMP to you so you can see it. I have a US Robotics 14.4 V.32/42bis with HyperACCESS software. If you have the same, I could modem it to you in about 1 minute (slightly less than 1 MB). The photos cover the Far East (where I lived for 30+ years), plus the rest of the world where I traveled too frequently. Rough idea on CD-ROM is probably 100 images in the same five resolutions that KODAK offers. Will probably include some sound tracks as well. Idea is to go for $50-$60 retail, distributor's price around $20-$25. There will be no royalty on photo or sound. Hope to begin releasing them within 45 days and plan to do one every two weeks if they sell. Jan