Word: cd
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...wagon trains pulled up to the Great Salt Lake in the summer of 1847. That once small choir soon became one of the world's finest battalion-size forces (325 singers), reason enough for Sony Music to reissue some of the MORMON TABERNACLE CHOIR'S top hits. The five-CD set includes hymns, Civil War songs and American standards. The choir's ringing harmonies and bright tones are perfectly suited to chorales (Sheep May Safely Graze, with its heavenly shifting of voices) or patriotic marches (The Caissons Go Rolling Along, sung with a suitable military fervor). Some show tunes, though...
...could, however, be a tough sell. Few Americans own computers powerful enough to manipulate images, and even fewer have the equipment needed to retrieve pictures stored on a compact disc (a Philips CD Interactive system will do it, as will some CD-ROM computer drives). Kodak sells a $400 Photo CD player that reads both music and photographic compact discs, but until such devices are widely used, the company is likely to be caught in a classic chicken-and-egg marketing bind: people won't want to spend $25 to have their pictures put on a disc they cannot play...
Still, there is something about the Kodak idea that has the aura of inevitability. Photo CD is the public's first glimpse of a technological revolution that has been developing for more than a decade. Like music, text and telephones, photography is going digital. What was once a purely chemical process -- by which crystals of silver halide were exposed to light and turned into visual representations (or analogs) of an actual scene -- is being transformed into an electronic process that turns the same information into strings...
...pictures may look the same -- at least to the untrained eye. Purists point out that Photo CD images contain only about 18 million pixels (picture elements), which is roughly equivalent to the visual information represented by the 20 million silver molecules in a standard 35-mm negative. But that is about one-fifth the resolution offered by high-quality Kodachrome slides, and it cannot compare with the glorious large-format pictures that Ansel Adams labored to create...
...paper, the long- term future of film technology is far from certain. There are already electronic cameras on the market, including one made by Kodak, that take digital pictures without using film. The results look fine on a TV screen, but the prints are of poor quality. What Photo CD does, Kodak executives say, is give the owners of the world's 250 million conventional film cameras the best of both technologies: high-quality prints and low-cost input devices for the new digital systems...