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Kodak faces the wireless bottleneck for cameras with a new company

The easiest way to get pictures out of a digital camera is to pull the memory chip out and plug it into a computer; but Kodak thinks there's a big market for wireless as an alternative.

Spin-off company Appairent Technologies will make pictures appear over the air waves. Eastman Kodak Company will form this new company, based on patented wireless technologies from its research and development labs.

"Wireless communication is critical as imaging and information technologies converge," said James Stoffel, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Eastman Kodak Company.

Appairent is aiming at new markets. It sees wireless transmission of high quality video, still images and data, as crucial to the move out of chemistry, into electronics. It is under a lot of pressure to do this; not only is digital imaging much more "instant" than sending films off for processing, but there's a looking resource problem; silver is running out. And most chemical photography depends on silver halides; which means it is going to get more and more costly.

The problem isn't a killer today. Most people who take digital pictures use cameras with as maximum of 64 megabytes of memory; it takes only a few seconds to get this data out of a compact flash card, into a PC.

But future "digital imaging" applications are going to involve sending photo and video data from cameras with far, far bigger data stores, and in situations where people don't have their PC with them.

For example, there are already devices which hold five gigabytes of data. There's a hard disk device which looks like a compact flash card; there are devices like Apple's iPod.

And when your video camera fills up on holiday, Kodak would like to have franchised outlets with wireless access points, able to collect all the images and send it home for you - for a fee. But today's wireless technology isn't fast enough; and today's image compression techniques not powerful enough.

Kodak's goal is to expand the infoimaging category which it regards as a $225 billion industry "created by the convergence of images and information technology."

"The greatest value in this intellectual property and the technology it enables lies in making it broadly available. We look forward to using Appairent's wireless communication technology in our own products and to seeing much broader applications and infrastructure," said Stoffel.

Full text of Kodak's announcement is available on the corporate Web site.