Can You Picture This?

Starting this month, Americans taking their vacation snapshots to be developed will be offered a choice that may seem mystifying. In addition to the usual range of options -- from color slides to jumbo prints -- they will be invited to have their pictures scanned by a computer and stored on a "Photo CD" -- a compact disc that looks just like one that might play the latest Guns N' Roses release but in fact stores all the shots of the kids and the Grand Canyon in digital form. These newfangled photo albums hold up to 100 images, stored for a fee of about $1 a frame. They can be viewed, without risk of fading or fraying, on an ordinary television set using a special CD player.

Eastman Kodak is betting that Photo CDs will eventually become as familiar to photographers around the world as its bright yellow boxes of film. It has succeeded in persuading such competitors as Fuji, Agfa and Konica to agree to one standard for the discs, although Kodak is first to offer the product. What the company envisions is a future in which devices that play Photo CDs -- which also double as music CD players -- have become standard equipment in home entertainment centers, alongside the stereo, the TV and the VCR. Kodak pictures families gathered in living rooms to see photos displayed on TV screens -- and, eventually, on high-resolution HDTV.

The more creative photographers will have the chance to load Photo CD images into home computers and turn their Macs and PCs into electronic darkrooms, where they can create studio-quality pictures that might be printed on color printers, turned into Christmas cards or sent to friends and relatives over ordinary phone lines. Adventurous types will even be able to manipulate the digitized images, pixelediting crazy Uncle Harry out of a shot, for example, or grafting his head onto Fido's body.

It 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, and few will want to buy the player without a library of discs to view.

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 of 0s and 1s.