S,
Considerable discussion on the Kodak Photo CD format has erupted from your
post. This format is a film-to-digital service and since you are using your
own digital camera, you may not be able to use this format. I don't think you
can take a bunch of floppy disks to the camera shop and have them mastered to
photo CD... someone correct me if I am wrong.
Your camera came with a program for downloading the images and converting them
to different formats. I haven't used the Casio, but my experience with the
Kodak DC-50 has taught me a few things. The DC-50 shoots the images at about
750x450 pixels @ 24bit color. Each image downloaded to a .BMP format was
about 1.5megs. I can't remember the DPI at this time. Shoot a few pictures
with the Casio, download them to the PC and see what dimensions, DPI and file
size they come out at. You can load the images into Adobe Photoshop to view
this information. Since you are also using a scanner, you may wish to adopt
the standard size the camera shoots at for scanned images as well. Another
strategy would be to adopt a standard for most images, yet have high
resolution scans made from photographs of objects with special details.
You are right about JPG formats, they are lossy and you will see this when you
begin to compare them side by side with lossless formats. I selected BMP for
a recent project as this is the primary image format for Windows and is widely
supported. Remember that you can convert images to different formats (JPG
for your web site), but if you don't keep the original image as the highest
practical quality, you will find that you can't convert from less to more.
Depending on the size of your collection, it may cost less to purchase your
own CD writing drive rather than pay a service beaureau to convert them for
you. They are fairly inexpensive (around $800). The disks range from $7-10,
but if you bought a large quantity, I'm sure you could get a discount. Each
disk holds 650 megabytes of information. The CD-ROM is a standard piece of
equipment on computers today so others will be able to read the images as
well. I would also recommend that you have Adobe Photoshop 4.0. You will
need this for adjusting color on scans and digital photographs of objects.
Version 4.0 supports batch operations such as converting, sizing and saving
several images at one time. I just received my upgrade so I haven't tested
it's batch capabilities yet, but that's why I bought it. When you start
dealing with hundreds or thousands of images... saving a few seconds
converting and saving each image will mean the difference between taking the
weekend off, or working through it!
Your post mentioned using these images in a "regional digital archive." If
other museums are involved, the issue of a standard becomes more important.
How are you planning to retrieve these images? It seems that you may have put
the cart before the horse. Are you planning public access terminals to
collections information and pictures, or an intra-museum database? Will the
pictures be the only information, or will other data be included as well. See
where I'm getting...? If I wanted to see an image of an object in your
collection, how would I know on which disk to look? If you are interested in
pursuing this duscussion, let me know.
Hope this helps.
Mark C. Vang : Freya Ventures : (757) 340-0099
2100 Mediterranean Ave. Suite 15
Virginia Beach, VA 23451
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