CHAPTER 13

Compact Disc and Drive Formats Chapter 13
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Multisession Photo CDs
One breakthrough of the PhotoCD concept is that each of the disc types is capable of containing multiple
sessions. Because the average consumer wouldn’t usually have enough film processed to fill an
entire disc, you can bring back your partially filled CDs each time you have more film to develop. A
new session is then added to your existing CD until the entire disc is filled. You pay less for the processing
because a new CD is not necessary, and all your images are stored on a smaller number of
discs.
Any XA-compliant or XA-ready CD-ROM drive can read the multiple sessions on a PhotoCD disc, and
even if your drive is not multisession capable, it can still read the first session on the disc. If this is
the case, you must purchase a new disc for each batch of film you process, but you can still take
advantage of PhotoCD technology.
Kodak provides software that enables you to view the PhotoCD images on your PC and licenses a
PhotoCD import filter to the manufacturers of many desktop publishing, image-editing, and paint
programs. Therefore, you can modify your PhotoCD images using a program such as Adobe
Photoshop and integrate them into documents for printing or electronic publication with a page
layout program such as Adobe PageMaker.
Picture CD
Although Kodak still offers PhotoCD services, the high cost has led to limited popularity. Kodak now
offers the simpler Picture CD and Picture Disk services. Unlike PhotoCD, these services use the
industry-standard JPEG file format. Picture CD uses a CD-R, with images stored at a single mediumresolution
scan of 1,024×1,536 pixels. This resolution is adequate for 4”×6” and 5”×7” prints. The lessexpensive
Picture Disk service stores images on a 1.44MB floppy disk at a resolution of 400×600,
suitable for screensavers and slide shows.
The software provided with Picture CD enables the user to manipulate images with various automatic
or semiautomatic operations, but unlike PhotoCD, the standard JPEG (JPG) file format used for storage
enables any popular image-editing program to work with the images without conversion.
Although the image quality of Picture CD isn’t as high as with PhotoCD, the much lower price of the
service should make it far more popular with amateur photographers.
White Book—Video CD
The White Book was introduced in 1993 by Philips, JVC, Matsushita, and Sony. It is based on the
Green Book (CD-i) and CD-ROM XA standards and allows for storing up to 74 minutes of MPEG-1
video and ADPCM digital audio data on a single disc. The latest version was released in April 1995.
You can think of video CDs as a sort of poor man’s DVD format, although the picture and sound
quality is actually quite good—certainly better than VHS or most other videotape formats. You can
play video CDs on virtually any PC with a CD-ROM drive using the free Windows Media Player (other
media player applications can be used as well). They also can be played on most DVD players and
even some game consoles, such as the Playstation (with the right options). Video CDs are an especially
big hit with people who travel with laptop computers, and the prerecorded discs are much
cheaper than DVD—many as little as $5.
Blue Book—CD EXTRA
Manufacturers of CD-DA media were looking for a standard method to combine both music and data
on a single CD. The intention was for a user to be able to play only the audio tracks in a standard
audio CD player while remaining unaware of the data track. However, a user with a PC or a dedicated
combination audio/data player could access both the audio and data tracks on the same disc.