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To: JJB who wrote (1397)	11/9/1997 1:50:00 AM
From: Mike Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

More on digital cameras: ======================== Digital cameras click? Digital cameras vie for a shot By Yoshika Hara, EE Times Tokyo -- With 20 vendors jostling for market share in digital still cameras, most are looking to add differentiating features. The spate of digital still cameras released in Japan last week added some variety to such digital-camera staples as JPEG compression and photo output to a computer screen at VGA resolution. NEC Corp. introduced a camera that can quickly prepare photos for transmission to the Net. The camera has a built-in 1.8-inch metal-insulator-metal (MIM) LCD color monitor, is about the size of a cigarette pack and weighs 185 g without the batteries. Two AA batteries provide sufficient juice for about 30 minutes of shooting. A 28-MHz 486 microprocessor simplifies DOS file operations. The camera can create a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) format file from a stored snapshot. Kyushu Matsushita Electric Co. Ltd. also emphasizes compactness in its newest offering--a 21-mm-thick camera that has no built-in LCD and that uses a quarter-inch VGA progressive-scan CCD. Matsushita went with a hardware solution for image processing. A 160,000-gate ASIC with an embedded 32-bit RISC CPU enables shooting and JPEG compression of a quarter VGA frame in 0.5 second and a full VGA frame in 1 second. Minolta Camera Co. Ltd. has brought out a camera that features a detachable lens, offering "free angle" shooting. Sanyo strove for a competitive advantage with a built-in LCD display based on its low-temperature polysilicon process. The 2-inch, 110,000-pixel LCD is said to offer superior picture quality over amorphous silicon monitors. Sanyo built a 4-Mbit split-gate flash memory into the camera. It is pitching the use of a television as the display monitor, with a computer interface as an option. Olympus Optical Co. Ltd. has expanded the capacity of its camera's built-in flash memory from 2 Mbytes in the previous model to 3 Mbytes for the latest version, which features 2.7-times zooming. Sharp Electronics Corp.'s latest digital still camera uses a MiniDisc to store data. The camera is relatively bulky but can store 2,000 frames on one disk. It can read and write in the Audio MD, Picture MD and Data MD formats and thus is being billed as more than a camera. Whereas Olympus and Sanyo opted for built-in flash memory, others are adopting external card adapters. SanDisk's CompactFlash and Toshiba's Smart Media appear to be gaining ground in the external-card camp, leaving behind the larger Miniature Card format. NEC (which has a 256-Mbit-flash development alliance with SanDisk) and Matsushita (SanDisk's main foundry) went with CompactFlash cards. Minolta used Toshiba's Smart Media card. (c) CMP Media, Inc