BitJazz Press Releases
October 14, 1998

BitJazz Ships Software Development Kit for Lossless Image Compression

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., (October 14, 1998) -- BitJazz Inc. today announced shipment of BitJazz™ Software Development Kit, giving application developers and plug-in developers access to the most powerful lossless photo-quality image compressor on the market. Available at http://www.bitjazz.com/ free of charge, the SDK includes all PhotoJazz™ interface files, working sample code, and complete documentation. Currently for Power Macintosh, the Windows version will ship simultaneously with BitJazz Tools for Windows early in November.

Highest Lossless Compression

BitJazz offers developers access to the highest available lossless compression ratio for photo-quality images (averaging 2.5 for Kodak's standard color test images), thus cutting image transmission time and storage space for their users without sacrificing speed or memory during compression: BitJazz uses the same amount of memory for any size image, and compresses 3 times as fast as PNG. For example, a 4.5MB 1536*1024-pixel photo-quality RGB image BitJazz typically compresses down to just 1.8MB, taking only 14 minutes instead of 35 to transmit over a 28.8Kbaud modem line.

Attractive Licensing Policy

Under the basic developer license, developers can incorporate the PhotoJazz interface in their software free of charge, and their users can read PhotoJazz images once they download the BitJazz engine free of charge as part of BitJazz Tools from BitJazz's website. BitJazz also offers developers the option to integrate the BitJazz engine into their products for a reasonable licensing fee. The free BitJazz Tools package includes the PhotoJazz plug-in for Photoshop, and PhotoJazz XT for QuarkXPress.

Thoroughly Documented Interface

The object-oriented PhotoJazz API consists of high-level platform-independent suites for getting and setting image parameters and tile-based suites for reading and writing the image, plus cleanly separated low-level platform-specific callback suites for stream i/o, memory allocation, thread management, and private-data interpretation. Written in ANSI C for portability, the interface supports all popular photo-quality color modes with any number of color and other channels, as well as ICC profiles and application-specific private data. The BitJazz engine relieves the developer of all internal file-format concerns, including chunking, tagging, parameter ordering, byte reversal, alignment, and CRC computation, yet allows the PhotoJazz image to be embedded in another file or in memory. Complete cross-linked HTML documentation, also available on-line, explains all objects, functions, parameters, and data types, exemplified with code snippets where appropriate. Also included in the SDK are sources for fully functional stand-alone applications converting raw images to PhotoJazz format and back.

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, photography, and other digital arts as well as the medical, satellite and communications sectors. Additional information can be found on the BitJazz website, http://www.bitjazz.com/.

BitJazz and PhotoJazz are trademarks of BitJazz Inc. Macintosh is a trademark of Apple Computer, 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.