T3D digicam PNG formats?

[bob Wier <wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>In one of my Kodak Paper Sample Books there is an image of a chemist behind
>a table full of lab gear. Lots of glass. If you glance at the image, it
>looks so tack sharp you fear cutting your eyes. If you study the image, it
>becomes apparent that it is really not that sharp. The reason it appears
>sharp is because of the subject matter-glassware, in this case. Image
>contrast is well controlled, it is printed on F surface paper and is well
>made. So I can see where sharpness is not the only thing that can
>contribute to the appeal of an image.

I have that as well. It's pretty amazing what printing on high
contrast paper will do for *apparent* sharpness if the subject will
tolerate it. I recall that the Black & White papers (I liked Medalist
if I'm remembering correctly) which tended to have very black blacks
and white whites were not generally considered appropriate for
portraiture.

The same sort of thing happens today with image samples from
color printers and digicams. You'll see gloriously colored pictures
(parrots, etc), but for a *real* test, take a look at a picture
of a clear blue sky starting at the horizon and extending up
towards the zenith. The subtle blue gradations will really expose
any warts in the system (and also in the digial process for digicams
via jpeg, etc).

Here's a question - does anyone know or has heard of a digicam
manufacturer including PNG format as a storage option? PNG (for
anyone not familiar with it) is a relatively new loss*less*
format (unlike jpeg) which still gives fairly good compression
to reduce the size of the stored image, but will expand out
to give the origninal image exactly (PNG is "Portable Network
Graphics", I think). It has a lot of capability,
including gamma specifications and so forth. I'm tending to use
it heavily for in-house generated images where appropriate 
in place of jpeg. I believe both current browsers (NS and IE) support
auto expansion of it. Seems like a natural format for digicams,
except *perhaps* it might be processor intensive to generate it
in a reasonable length of time.

There are other loss*less* formats such as an old PCX (but
I don't think it will do 24 bit), some BMP formats, and
the little known JBIG and JPEG-LS formats. But PNG seems to be
the closest to being universally accepted at the moment.
                        

For some non-stereo sample PNG images, take a look at

http://www.calcite.rocky.edu/ftp/class/csc326_graph/class_images/spring1999

Some of these were generated 24 bit directly into PNG via POVRAY.

(note = they are large, some are 1 meg (compressed!)

THANKS!

--Bob Wier

       mailto:wier@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 
       9:50 AM Friday, July 30, 1999
     Unix/Internet Systems Administrator
    Rocky Mountain College, Billings, MT
      (currently in Ouray, Colorado)



------------------------------

End of TECH-3D Digest 512
*************************