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June 7, 1999

Digital Imaging For Business

Digital cameras are moving beyond specialty markets to become tools that can fuel business initiatives

By Julekha Dash

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igital cameras are developing a new image. Not long ago, these products were typically considered either high-end specialty gear for photojournalism or graphics projects, or as low-end electronic toys for consumers. But a growing number of companies are looking at the hardware as tools that can propel business initiatives.

NFL Properties Inc., which represents the 31 teams in the National Football League, expects digital cameras to play an important part in the online photo gallery it's launching this fall for licensees, including Hallmark and Nike, that buy images to feature on products such as mugs and T-shirts. The service is being tested now and will have 20,000 to 25,000 photos online the first year--fewer than 5% taken with a digital camera.

But Paul Spinelli, director of photographic services for NFL Properties, says the company plans to add another 20,000 to 25,000 images each year to NFLPhotos.com, and digital cameras will be used to take many of the new pictures. "You can post the images immediately after shooting [a game] without having to process and develop film," Spinelli says. That means NFL Properties can shave up to four weeks off the time it would normally take to make pictures from some games available for purchase. That's a plus in a project that was designed to speed the research and acquisition process for customers.

Self-Service Images
Before NFL Properties came up with the idea of the online service, customers would have to initiate photo requests via the telephone and employees would have to search through archives manually to select pictures that met a client's requirements. NFL Properties staff would then scan the photos for E-mail delivery or ship them overnight, and spend a lot of time following up with clients via phone and fax. With the new process, clients will be able to search and view offerings online and immediately purchase and download the images they want.

In a recent InfoTrends Research study, 59% of almost 600 digital-camera users said they rely on digital cameras for business use. Business interest in these devices is helping to expand the market almost fourfold--to 5 million units in 2002, compared with 1.3 million units in 1998.

What's driving businesses to embrace filmless cameras for new efforts? For one thing, the quality of hardware has improved, says Steve Hoffenberg, director of digital photography at Lyra Research. NFL Properties is using a handful of $15,000 Canon EOS D2000 professional digital cameras, which feature a high-quality 2 million pixel charge-coupled device imaging sensor and sophisticated focusing and metering technologies. One of the reasons NFL Properties is expanding its use of digital cameras, Spinelli says, is because the Canon camera now offers the high-quality resolution it needs for its business application.

He says he expects advances in digital-camera quality will account for a tenfold increase each year in the number of digital photos NFLPhotos.com posts. "The more the technology grows, the frame capture and image quality will rival traditional cameras," Spinelli says.

Meanwhile, prices for more general-purpose digital cameras have dropped in recent years, as they've increased in overall quality. A 2-megapixel (1,800-by-1,200-pixel resolution) digital camera today has five times the resolution of a 640-by-480-pixel VGA camera, which was the digital standard two years ago, Hoffenberg says. Such cameras for the general user market are typically priced starting at less than $1,000. And prices for megapixel (1,280-by-960-pixel resolution) digital cameras for general business use have fallen to as low as $400 to $900.

Card Party
Other technology advances include higher-capacity choices in removable memory cards for storing images, from PC Cards to SmartMedia to CompactFlash cards that can store up to 64 Mbytes worth of pictures. Removing a memory card from a digital camera and popping it into a compatible reader on a notebook or PC also provides an easier way of transferring images than using a slow and cumbersome serial cable connection. The Sony Mavica MVC-FD81 even lets users store 16 high-resolution images directly onto a standard diskette, which they can then transfer to their PC's floppy-disk drive.