Preserving the family history on CD

The compact disc can become the Smithsonian of your family's pictorial history. With the price of drives for recording data onto CDs sliding, more photography enthusiasts are archiving their digital images and creating photo albums with their personal computers just as music fans customize audio CDs.

One disc can store 650 megabytes of photos, handling even the needs of professional photographers. The typical 4MB diskette, on the other hand, can barely hold an average-size image. What's more, photos on a CD will last longer than those on a removable hard drive, tape or floppy disk; they will be preserved in their original state for 50 to 100 years, experts in the technology say.

Drives that write data onto CDs, previously the domain of software publishers and developers because of expense, now cost as little as $200. Though pricier per disc than a floppy, a blank CD costs less than a penny per megabyte of information, making it the least expensive method for storing data.

With your photos archived in digital albums tucked away on your CD-ROM shelf - and taking up much less space than bulky photo albums - you're free to show them, e-mail them or insert them into creative projects.

New frame of reference

Look at a picture frame and you think "picture frame." Sony looked at one and envisioned an elegantly designed liquid crystal display for showing off digital stills and videos with sound.

The Digital Photo Frame, with a crisp 5 1/2-inch active matrix LCD can display still pictures in JPEG format, presented full-frame, as thumbnails or cycled through as a slide show. Short MPEG videos can also be played.

The foundation for the Digital Photo Frame is the Memory Stick. This is a proprietary, removable storage wafer that holds pictures and sounds generally captured using a compatible Sony digital camera or camcorder.

A Memory Stick, which comes in capacities of up to 32 megabytes, is inserted in a flip-down control panel. Images from it can be forwarded, reversed, rotated and otherwise manipulated using the panel's buttons and an on-screen menu.

E-books compete with print 

New technologies are bridging the gap between the printed and electronic word.

For most people, the Web is inaccessible during significant portions of everyday life. Sure, you could fire up your laptop with wireless modem to access the latest news during the morning train ride, but few people do. Why bother, when an ordinary newspaper is so much lighter and easier to use?

This chasm between the convenience of paper and rich but cumbersome possibilities of the Internet has caught the attention of several groups. One of the first forays into this void has given substance to that musty science-fiction cliche, the electronic book.

At least three major contestants are already peddling this icon of the future. All three products have enlargeable text and backlit screens to make reading easy, and all claim access to a large library to select from.

NuvoMedia started delivering its "Rocket eBook" in 1998. The paperback-size unit plugs into a PC and downloads books from contracted online book sellers. The liquid-crystal display can be flipped in any direction, so both righties and lefties can hold the book in one hand while  scrolling down pages using a thumb switch.

SoftBook's electronic book, which soon followed, is larger (about the size of a ream of copier paper) but less expensive, and doesn't require a PC  instead, a phone line connects the unit directly to the company's web site.

Both the SoftBook and the Rocket eBook use HTML-format documents. At present, however, the eBook can load only books; a future software upgrade will allow the device to read any HTML document.

The third electronic book, the EB Dedicated Reader from EveryBook hit the market in January, 1999. It uses a PDF format (which produces detailed page images rather than the text-plus-graphics mosaic of HTML). The Dedicated Reader is the only one of the three that has a full-color screen and two leaves that open like a book. It incorporates an infrared transmitter that can be used to send files to a printer, should you desire a return to ancient technology. And it stores books on removable cards, so you can lend your books to other people--an intrinsic part of the book experience that is currently missing from the other contestants. On the downside, the EB Dedicated Reader is three times as expensive and somewhat larger than the others.

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