From: buck@ra.nrl.navy.mil (Loren Buchanan)
Subject: Re: Quality
Followup-To: rec.photo
Summary: Kodak is a large company, part a doesn't know part b
Keywords: Kodak PhotoCD
Organization: Naval Research Lab, Washington, DC
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 20:44:18 GMT

In article <1d9f0bINNo70@life.ai.mit.edu> gill@impulse.ai.mit.edu (Gill Pratt) writes:
>
>Mike,
>
>	It was a pleasure to read your response to my letter. I had
>not realized from your previous messages that you were on our side.

No, Mike is on Kodak's side (he knows who signs his paycheck), its just 
that his opinions more closely match ours than the parts of Kodak the sets 
marketing policy.  Kodak is a large company and it is impossible for anyone 
to know what is going on all over the company.  Kodak is working on 
positioning itself to survive well into the next century.  My opinion on 
what Kodak is doing is hedging their bets that electronic imaging will over 
the next 10, 20 or more years will replace film imaging entirely.  In some 
respects Kodak is just doing what it did 100 years ago with photography.  If 
you want to discuss these issues, please take them to a more appropiate 
newsgroup.

>	Similarly, your company's assertion that independent software
>developers wouldn't do a good job developing decoding software from
>algorithmic specifications or source code is not credible. Inventing
>the Photo-CD algorithms may have taken a lot of talent, but adapting
>the algorithms to specific tasks is not that hard. The fact that a few
>people have already done a half-decent job working blind should
>testify to that.

The whole issue of calibrated color is the topic of a very large book (which
has yet to be written).  I do not know the details of Kodak's YCC format
although I suspect it to be similar to YCbCr (lower case letters are 
subscripts) used in television.  From the breif look at one of the above
referenced independent efforts, I would guess the the color transformation
is incorrect (but it is probably close enough for my purposes).

>	As, another example, I recently used my favorite
>Kodak-approved software, Photo Publisher, to convert a photo-CD image
>into a GIF image, only to find the result far darker than the
>original.  

Around here my first guess at where the conversion went wrong was gamma
correction.  Does Photo Publisher have a gamma setting option?  Or can
you change the gamma of your computer to what Photo Publisher expects.
Again this gets back to the calibrated color space issues.  In terms of
color accuracy, does Photo Publisher know what phosphor set your monitor
uses.  Of course even knowing these values will not ensure correct color
because this depends on other factors such as ambient lighting (good luck
if you have fluorescent lighting), monitor age, linearity of the video
driver circuits in your computer, etc.  These are all outside the control
of Kodak.  Another point about the size of Kodak, is that the people who
developed YCC may not have even done it for PhotoCD, but was "borrowed"
via an internal transfer.  

>	The core issue is Kodak's unfortunate decision to severely
>constrain development of software products that utilize Photo-CD.

I agree that it is an unfortuante decision from my viewpoint as a techno-
weinie.  As Joe Blo consumer, I could just about care less.  As a mutual
fund investor (I don't play in the stock market directly) I think Kodak
is doing the right thing by not overextending their support resources on
a technology that is risky.

>If there are
>people at Kodak who might be swayed by reasoned arguments to lower
>license fees for small developers, please let the news group know
>their names and business addresses. I'd wager there are many folks
>listening who would write eloquent letters, sent by US mail, to help
>do the convincing.

I would like to write a letter, but supporting getting tools to the end
user.  I really don't have a customer I can pass the costs onto, but I
would like to be able to both read PhotoCd images into the various applications
we have around here, and be able to take the output of these applications
and save them on a PhotoCd.

>p.s. A recent posting stated that Kodak has not yet tested any
>multi-session drives for compatibility with Photo-CD. Is this still
>true? If not, could you give us an up-to-date list of which drives are
>currently on the market that you have tested, and which will likely be
>coming soon?

As the poster of that recent posting, I have learned that the Apple CD 300
and CD 300i models (which are actually some Sony model).  But as I type
this, I just found out that these drives won't be available until January.

Lets stop the Kodak bashing, and see what we can do via other means to
open their eyes to the possibilities we see.  I realize that the we in last
sentence does include Kodak employees, particularly those who read this
news group and have been kind enough to share with us their knowledge.

B Cing U

Buck

-- 
Loren Buchanan (buck@curie.nrl.navy.mil) | #include <standard.disclaimer>
NRL Code 5842, 4555 Overlook Ave.        | #include <computer.graphics>
Washington, DC 20375      (202) 767-3884 | #include <electronic.music>
Phone tag, America's fastest growing business sport.
Newsgroups: rec.photo