BitJazz Press Releases
September 1, 1998

Powerful Compression and Decompression Tools
for Graphics Professionals

Advanced Technology Sets New Standard for Lossless Photo-Quality Image Compression

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., (September 1, 1998) -- BitJazz Inc. today announced at Seybold the availability of BitJazz Tools™, a revolutionary set of tools for lossless image compression and decompression of photographic quality images. PhotoJazz™ is a Photoshop-compatible plug-in for reading and writing PhotoJazz files, and PhotoJazz™ XT is a QuarkXPress-compatible plug-in for reading PhotoJazz files. The company charges a licensing fee for compressors only; decompressors and viewers are distributed at no charge and will be available for download from http://www.bitjazz.com/ and other sites on the Internet.

BitJazz Sets New Industry Standard

Founders Andreas Wittenstein and Jim Lloyd, who contributed to the development of the Toy Story™ CD-ROMs, Quick RenderMan™, MacInTax™, and the Phonetic Engine™, have developed a new standard for lossless image compression technology for the compression and bit-for-bit retrieval of photographic-quality images from PhotoJazz files. With an average compression ratio of 2.5 for photo-quality RGB images, PhotoJazz surpasses the two most widely used lossless compression formats, TIFF-LZW and PNG, which have compression ratios of 1.6 and 1.8 respectively. PhotoJazz is the only format that will reduce a file size by more than half, something that graphics professionals agree is essential. Historically, BitJazz's breakthrough compression ratio is unprecedented. Following the introduction of Huffman coding in 1952, it took more than 40 years to inch the compression ratio up from 1.4 to 1.8, with the introduction of PNG in 1995. Now, just three years later, BitJazz introduces a compression ratio of 2.5 for photographic-quality images.

BitJazz Tools Lend Greater Efficiency

The BitJazz collection of easy-to-use tools enables digital artists, photographers and publishers to compress and expand photographic-quality images quickly and efficiently, resulting in increased hard disk storage capacity and faster file transfer over networks and via the Internet. BitJazz compression technology is perfectly lossless, allowing users to edit images repeatedly with zero degradation. Additionally, the BitJazz compression engine provides support for CMYK and multichannel images, enabling digital artists preparing images for four-color offset printing more options than TIFF-LZW compression. BitJazz Tools for Macintosh will be available in September. BitJazz Tools for Windows will be available in the fourth quarter of 1998.

BitJazz Inc. is emerging as the new market leader in lossless image compression and decompression technology and development. The company develops compression technology for key digital imaging markets, including electronic publishing, graphic design and photography, and other digital arts as well as the medical, satellite and communications sectors. Additional information can be found on the BitJazz site at http://www.bitjazz.com/.

BitJazz and PhotoJazz are trademarks of BitJazz Inc. All other trademarks, registered trademarks, service names and product and/or brand names mentioned herein are the sole property of their respective owners. PhotoJazz US patent pending.