I have been browsing through this site (great job!) and there is little discussion on the Kodak DC260's FlashPix file format feature. The FlashPix file format appears to be one fantastic graphics file format; however, the DC260 doesn't seem to take advantage of the FlashPix file format capabilities. I have taken pictures of identical subjects in both JPG and FXP formats and on close analysis there appears to be no difference in picture quality. Sad... but true. Anyone have any comments or thoughts on the subject?

-- Brian Leslie (bleslie@gte.net), December 18, 1998

Answers

FlashPix is dead. You can't even call it FlashPix -- there is a tiny company that has legal rights on this name, just couple of months ago it sued everyone, and Kodak paid the biggest fine. And you should not care. This was another well-conceived and badly implemented Kodak's idea. These people don't seem to learn anything. Chemical company should not develop software. This requires a different culture (and talent!).

In essence, FPX (as it is required to be called from now on) _is_ JPEG. And this is the most misfortunate of all. The idea behind FPX's multiple resolution was the first real-world implementation of simplest form of wavelet compression. Instead of developing in this direction, FPX's creators strapped on JPEG compression scheme, creating a strange and heavy aggregate of ideas.

The 'real' advantage of using FPXs is when you have _really_ large files. This advantage can be felt, though, only if you have an adequate support from the software that fully exploits this advantage, and you don't have such software. The closest candidates would be Microsoft PictureIt and Live Picture's Live Picture, but former doesn't even mention that it uses FPX foundation and the latter is cheesy. Kodak does no longer promotes FPX.

The bottom line: FPX is no a substitute for actual capabilities of the capturing device. In the case DC260, the camera merely creates an FPX envelope around the same image data, in fact, without even generating intermediate resolutions (as was properly judged by Kodak's talents, this would take too much time and memory  how ingenious!)

-- Kyril Feldman (kyrilf@email.com), December 19, 1998.