Rami Arieli: "The Laser Adventure" Section 9.4.1 page 19
Photo CD - Standard

Storing digital images takes a lot of storage space.

Kodak developed a special CD format for storage of digital images.

This standard is called Photo-CD. It was developed by Kodak and Sony.

There are many advantages for storing images digitally, such as the possibility to change the image using special software.

An example is "creating memories" of our own visit to the moon, by a simple editing of our image, copying it onto the image of the moon surface.

Today digital cameras are becoming standard, and it is possible to convert regular films into digital pictures by using a scanner.

The Photo-CD Standard:

  1. Each CD can contain up to 100 pictures.
  2. Each picture is stored in one file at 5 different resolutions (number of pixels = picture elements):


    3. 128*192, 256*384, 512*768, 1024*1536, 2048*3072

  3. The quality of the picture in Photo-CD is of an 11"*14" size picture (28 [cm] * 36 [cm]), from a negative of 35 [mm].
A 35 [mm] film is scanned with a scanner at a resolution of 3072*2048.

Each picture element is multiplied by 3 Bytes to achieve 24 bits of color.

These results in image size of more than 18 [MB], but using compression, the actual storage of each picture is about 4.5 [MBytes].