Seybold New York
Of Apples and Apples...

by John Henshall


John Sculley, for ten years CEO of Apple Computer and now of Live Picture Incorporated, was one of the speakers in my 'Big Picture on Small Images - producing effective images for online delivery' session at Seybold New York in April. John demonstrated PhotoVista, Live Picture's answer to Apple's QuickTime VR, with files claimed to be only between a third and a tenth the size of QT VR files. The individual overlapping pictures are automatically stitched together to produce 360° panoramas which may be explored as though you were really there. It's impossible to illustrate this on the printed page but you should now be able to see it at the Live Picture website.

Below: John at Seybold with John Sculley, CEO of Live Picture Inc.

John Henshall with John Sculley, CEO of Live Picture Inc.

Something about John Sculley's presentation intrigued me. The former Apple boss used an IBM ThinkPad to drive his demonstration. Asked about this he said, 'The focus on technology moves in the value chain from the computer to the network. The Mac is an extraordinary product - I bought five of them last year, unfortunately only three of them worked - but the Macintosh is a great computer - still the best one out there - but the reality is that most of the really interesting things are happening out on the networks, and so taking multi-media technologies and starting to move them, particularly to server based models which can be viewed over any kind of device - whether it's a Mac, or whether it's a PC, or whether it's Web tv, or Net Channel or any of the other devices that are out there - I think is going to be where the action is.'

My own PowerBook 5300c 'bombed' during my other presentation, 'Digital Photography Now', when I plugged-in the Pixera Pro's PC Card. But the Macintosh 9500/200, kindly loaned to us by Apple Computer, performed faultlessly and with a speed I have never before experienced. I will not be changing in a hurry, although I do now have the use of a Hewlett Packard Pavilion 7340P 166MHz Pentium with MMX. Watch this space

New York - 5th Avenue camera shop salesmen are interested in the new digital camerasThe New York camera and electronics stores, on Fifth Avenue and in Times Square, are now vigorously promoting digital cameras right at the front of their shop windows. At one store - 'Photokina' - we were spotted photographing the window display with unidentified digital cameras. The salesmen immediately invited us in to show them the new cameras - Kodak's just announced DC120 and the Fujix DS-300 which will be available in June. As they examined every detail of the cameras, it soon became apparent that the salesmen had an in-depth knowledge of digital products.

We had ten digital cameras at Seybold, including the top-of-the-line Dicomed BigShot and Kodak DCS460. I've chosen three outstanding cameras to introduce to you on the following pages. These superb cameras combine high quality for their intended markets with reasonable prices. They are the beginning of a landslide towards digital imaging - a landslide which will be bigger than any political landslide.



This review first appeared in "John Henshall's Chip Shop" in "The Photographer" May 1997.
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