Applied Science Fiction Announces Seven Prestigious Honors for 2001

January 23, 2002 – Applied Science Fiction, Inc., creator of the award-winning Digital ICE™ and Digital ICE3 technologies, the leader of automatic photographic restoration applications and the inventor of the cutting-edge digital dry film processing system, Digital PIC, announces seven prestigious honors for its technologies in the year 2001. ASF will display their technologies at the upcoming Seybold 2002 (New York, NY, February 20 - 22, 2002) and PMA 2002 (Orlando, FL, February 24 - 27, 2002) trade shows.The company’s Digital ICE3 technology received a Cool2 Award for Best Imaging Software of 2001 from PEI Magazine. ASF’s Digital PIC technology was voted the Top New Technology for 2001 by the readers of Photographic Processing Magazine. In addition, the Nikon Super Coolscan® 4000 ED, which incorporates ASF’s Digital ICE3 technology, was also selected as the best in the Film Scanner category and the Pixel Magic Imaging, Inc. Photo Ditto® kiosk which features ASF’s Digital ICE and Digital ROC™ technologies received an honorable mention in the Kiosk category. The Nikon Coolscan® IV ED, featuring ASF’s Digital ICE3 technology, was also selected as the Best of 2001 in the Digital Imaging category from PC Magazine. ASF’s Digital PIC technology was chosen as one of the 23 Hot Picks for Seybold San Francisco 2001 in San Francisco, CA. In addition, the Nikon Super Coolscan® 8000ED, which incorporates ASF’s Digital ICE3 technology, was also selected as a Seybold Hot Pick. And, KPMG LLP honored Applied Science Fiction with the Industry Leadership award at the sixth annual KPMG Austin High Tech Awards in October 2001.

“Applied Science Fiction is honored to have receive these numerous recognitions for our unique Digital ICE3 automatic image restoration technology as well as our groundbreaking Digital PIC technology,” said Dan Sullivan, ASF’s president and CEO. “Our innovative award-winning technologies have been created to strongly benefit professional and amateur photographer’s digital imaging needs.”

PEI, published by the Professional Photographers of America, Inc., will feature all Cool2 award winners in the January 2002 issue. The sixth annual Cool2 Award honors the best imaging products of 2001. The industry’s most coveted awards are bestowed upon products that lead the field in innovative technology and design. PEI editors brought together a team of “cool” industry experts to select the most promising new products released between November 2000 and November 2001.

Photographic Processing is the leading magazine covering the photographic processing industry. The publication’s first annual Reader’s Choice Top Product Awards issue recognizes those products that did the most this year for their readers’ businesses in 2001. Nineteen categories were chosen for readers to vote on as well as a category honoring what readers selected as the Top Product Overall and Top New Technology in 2001.

Each year, the editors of Seybold Publications give their Hot Picks distinction to the industry’s most exceptional new products, technologies and services on display at Seybold San Francisco. This year, 23 products were selected from more than 100 nominees.

The Industry Leadership award is presented to a company in the Greater Austin area in recognition that it is considered an industry innovator and has demonstrated leadership in several categories. Applied Science Fiction was selected as the winner for the Industry Leadership category because of their success and innovation in developing revolutionary new technologies with compelling commercial applications for the digital and photographic industries.

Digital ICE3
ASF’s Digital ICE3 (pronounced ice cubed) suite is a combination of ASF’s Digital ICE, Digital ROC and Digital GEM™ film restoration technologies. Film scanners integrated with this trio provide professionals and photo enthusiasts alike with simple and automatic image restoration. ASF’s groundbreaking Digital ICE3 enables photographers, graphic artists and publishers to make the best possible scanned image files from original color negatives and slides automatically, even if there are scratches or dust on the film, the original color has faded or the images are grainy.

Digital PIC Process
Applied Science Fiction’s Digital PIC technology develops 35mm film directly into a high-resolution RGB digital format in one quick step. In the Digital PIC process, micro-amounts of a proprietary developing agent are applied to a roll of exposed but undeveloped film as it is fed through the processor’s image-capture engine. The environmentally friendly Digital PIC process requires no water, generates no hazardous effluents, and makes complete silver recovery possible. Next, the Digital PIC system makes a digital record of each image. Once the image data is captured, color data and exposure settings are established on a pixel-by-pixel basis for each element of every image. Complete 24-exposure roll development is accomplished within approximately six minutes of the film being fed to the image-capture engine.

Responding to the increasing demand for digitization of photographic images, this “film in, bits out” technology takes advantage of the high quality images produced by traditional photographic film, allowing traditional and one-time-use cameras to function as digital cameras. Once images have been developed using Digital PIC technology, they can be saved in any standard image file format (e.g., TIFF, JPEG, BMP). Digital PIC output can be directed to different devices, such as printers, palmtops, electronic archives and other storage media, such as CD and DVD disks. Consumers can choose to receive their images as photographic quality prints, in e-mail and through the Internet.

After a roll of film is developed using Digital PIC, a unique Extended Range Digital Negative™ (XRDN™) is produced on a CD. The XRDN CD offers consumers tremendous flexibility for communicating with images. The XRDN CD includes an index-print file plus high-, medium- and low-resolution image files that provide the consumer a convenient avenue to distribute their images in many ways. Digital PIC allows for consistent image quality, and is Internet and Broadband ready. Configurations for Digital PIC technology include photo kiosks, microlabs, backoffice workstations, backlabs, quick print stations and develop and print kiosks.

Digital ICE and Digital ROC for Flatbed Scanners
ASF’s award-winning Digital ICE technology automatically removes surface defects, such as dust and scratches without altering the underlying image; Digital ROC restores the color quality of an image, regardless of the condition of the original.

Digital ICE uses a defect map to identify the precise locations of physical defects, or visual "noise" on a print being scanned. Differential shadowing technology and proprietary software algorithms quickly and automatically eliminate the unwanted defects, producing a scanned image file that improves upon the original print. Digital ICE is designed to remove dust and lint while also correcting scratches, cracks and folds found on the surfaces of most prints. In addition, Digital ICE will even correct artifacts caused by textured papers as well as scratches on a scanner's glass platen.

Digital ROC automatically and accurately rebuilds the lost color values in prints, instantly creating color-corrected digitized images. Digital ROC identifies clues in the original medium to correct the color. Using a complex set of proprietary algorithms, Digital ROC reconstructs the actual colors from the original color data and presents a fully restored image.

About Applied Science Fiction
ASF develops proprietary technologies for the imaging industry that link traditional photography with the digital age. ASF licenses and brands its technologies through Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) that provide products for professional, retail and consumer imaging markets. Additionally, ASF directly distributes Adobe® Photoshop® compatible plug-ins for automatic image enhancement and correction.

ASF’s product portfolio consists of the Digital ICE3 suite, Digital ICE, Digital ROC and Digital GEM, the individual components of the suite, Digital ICE and Digital ROC for flatbed scanners, and Digital ROC plug-in for color restoration and Digital SHO™ plug-in for revelation of dark image-areas. ASF is also the innovator in digital dry film processing, with its environmentally friendly Digital PIC technology. Digital PIC develops exposed film directly into a high resolution RGB digital format file in minutes. Digital PIC produces an Extended Range Digital Negative (XRDN) on a CD from which photographic quality images can be easily printed. More information can be found on ASF’s Web site at www.asf.com.

SOURCE ASF