The new product, dubbed MrSID Photo Edition, lets consumers encode photos to optimize bandwidth and increase transmission speed for image files. Previously, MrSID was only available for high-end professionals in the geospatial and publishing markets. MrSID Photo Edition is the first free multiresolution file format application for consumer, according to John Grizz Deal, CEO of LizardTech. Now photos can be viewed at full screen size or zoomed to virtually any magnification while preserving the high quality of the original, he says. The resulting portability lets friends, family and digital camera buffs share quality images via e-mail and standard Web browsers at a fraction of the bandwidth previously required to send and receive photos.
Folks can pan and zoom MrSID-encoded images by downloading the free MrSID viewer.
The edition to be rolled out at this week's Internet World will be for Windows only. The Mac version is due next quarter. We're confident that we'll have MrSID Photo Edition ready for the Mac in time to have a real impact at July's Macworld New York. And we expect to have a large presence at that show. According to InfoTrends, nearly 10 percent of 70 billion photos taken worldwide this year will be digitized, and the percentage could increase to 50 percent within five years.