Photo CD

What Does Photo CD Mean?

Photo CD is a format introduced by Kodak in 1992 as a means to store and edit high-quality digital images that were taken using film and conventional cameras. It was widely used by professional photographers and for commercial purposes.

Photo CDs could store 100 high-quality digital images along with slides and scanned prints. The images had a special proprietary encoding. Photo CDs enabled users to view, store and edit pictures using computers. Their design was compliant with the CD-ROM XA and the CD-i Bridge specifications. The images stored in a Photo CD could be printed using a special Kodak machine.

Techopedia Explains Photo CD

Photo CDs were launched by Kodak to enable digitizing and storing of photos and negatives on compact disks that can be used in a computer. The images are stored as positive images in 5 to 6 levels of resolution. The image files are stored in the Image Pac format.

Images can be stored on a Photo CD while film is being developed or the CD can also be made from a set of slides or cut negatives. Images can also be added to a Photo CD that already contains data, creating a multisession disk.

The different types of the Photo CDs include:

• Standard master disc – maximum resolution: 2048 × 3072
• Catalog disc – maximum resolution: 512 × 768
• Professional disc – maximum resolution: 4096 × 6144

The process of storing an image on a Photo CD involves the following steps:

1. Each image is scanned using a special Kodak scanner.
2. The image is encoded using a proprietary technique.
3. The image is stored on the CD in different sizes using a multi-resolution format created by Kodak.

Photo CD images can be viewed on computers or on conventional televisions connected to dedicated CD-i players. At present, most CD-ROM players, DVD-ROM drives and recorders are capable of playing Photo CDs.

Kodak has stated that the shelf life of Photo CDs should be 30 years under normal home or work conditions.