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To: nord who wrote (2021)	12/7/1998 8:00:00 PM
From: nord	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4400

Dec 7 Pearl Harbor Day Thanks to my father and his generation who gave so much and now here we are a half century later no longer enemies what a long strange road it is eetimes.com EE Times Home This Week's News Digital camera makers back direct print format By Yoshiko Hara EE Times (10/28/98, 1:48 p.m. EDT) TOKYO ‹ A quartet of camera makers is taking steps to establish the platform for direct printing of digital still-camera pictures. Canon, Eastman Kodak, Fuji and Matsushita have proposed a scheme called DPOF (Digital Print Order Format) as a format for digital printing using removable media such as CompactFlash, SmartMedia, PCMCIA cards, and floppy and magneto-optical disks. The format specifies which frames are to be printed, how many copies of each picture to make and some print-control information, such as trimming and rotation. DPOF-compatible home printers and photofinishing print systems would automatically print frames based on the DPOF information embedded in the media. Twenty-one major digital still-camera vendors and photofinishing labs in Japan, the United States and Europe have come out in support of the format. Discussions on DPOF started in April. "There is no counterproposal, so we believe it will be the standard for direct printing," said Nobuaki Sakurada, general manager of digital imaging product development at Canon Inc. "DPOF is a simple format, so venders will introduce DPOF-compatible cameras and printers to the market soon-probably by next spring," he said. The four companies project that the digital still-camera market will comprise about 4 million units worldwide this year, and will expand to more than 10 million units around 2000. With that expansion, digital still cameras will morph from PC peripherals into common cameras for non-PC users. "An easy way of printing will be more and more in demand," saisaid that higher-resolution charge-coupled devices have already made the picture quality of the digital still camera satisfactory for home use. Indeed, "after we introduced a 1.5-megapixel camera, orders of printouts of digital still-camera pictures at photofinishing labs increased six times in just six months," said Shigeo Tanaka, chief technical associate for electronic imaging products at Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd. Ordering printouts at a photo lab, however, is now a cumbersome process of specifying each picture that is to be printed with a directory name and a file name. A DPOF-compatible camera will allow specifying the "keepers" when shooting or playing back the images. The specified pictures can then be automatically printed at a home printer or at a photofinishing lab.