CD-ROM: A New Frontier : Photo and Language Disks Can Show You How--Like a Book Never Could

As conveyors of information, books are tough to beat, even in this digital age. Books are portable and relatively cheap and never need a power source except a light to read by.

CD-ROMs are none of the above, but these shiny multimedia marvels have their own distinct advantages. When played on a CD-ROM driver hooked into a computer (and these days it’s getting tough to buy a home computer without a CD-ROM driver bundled into the package), they can deliver not only text, but also video, animation, stereo sound and spectacular graphics.

The trouble is, far too many of the current glut of how-to CD-ROMs--which purport to teach everything from plumbing to sex--delve into topics more appropriately explored in print. Is anyone really going to take a computer screen under the sink, let alone into the bedroom?

At the mammoth Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, three CD-ROMs were on display that break the mold and move beyond the gimmicky aspects of the medium and into brave new territory.

The topics they cover are photography, sign language and learning Spanish.

You want to be good at these skills? Then you’ll just have to practice, practice, practice out in the real world. These CD-ROMs, as delightful as they might be, are not magic bullets. But they do provide a good jumping-off point a book can’t match.

* “Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs” is the first and only how-to product put out by the little Seattle-based company DiAmar Interactive.

“You just can’t teach photography like this with a book,” said company president David Roberts, showing off his baby on a computer screen amid thousands of others demonstrating their wares at CES, which ended Monday.

He called up a close-up color photograph of a lizard in the desert. Depicted under the photo on the computer screen were buttons representing exposure and shutter speed--concepts mostly lost on us amateurs who tote around point-and-shoot cameras.

Clicking on these buttons, you can instantly see what the photo might look like on different settings--darker, lighter, more or less blurred. Manipulating the buttons, Roberts showed that at certain settings a background you didn’t even realize was there comes sharply into focus.

Suddenly you get an appreciation for the creativity that can be brought to even the most ordinary shot.

“Sure, you could show all these possibilities in a book, if you had at least 20 pages to spare for each shot,” Roberts said. “But with this CD-ROM, we can do it with a variety of photographs, and you can get an instant comparison.”

“Understanding Exposure” has just been released on a hybrid CD-ROM that can be used on Macintosh and Windows computers.

* “The American Sign Language Dictionary” from HarperCollins, is based on the book of the same title by educator Martin Sternberg. But on the printed page, you can’t get a real sense of how the signs look in action.

This CD-ROM, recently released in both Macintosh and Windows versions, offers animated line drawings and video clips to demonstrate 2,500 signs. You can slow the action down and zoom in for closer looks.

The program understands not only English, but also Spanish, German, French and Italian. Type in a word covered in the “Dictionary” in any of these languages, and the on-screen signer will show you the ASL sign.

* “TriplePlay Plus!” might be a more appropriate title for a baseball CD-ROM, but this impressive disk from Syracuse Language Systems (of Syracuse, N.Y.) goes far beyond most language software now available.

Like many such CD-ROMs, “TriplePlay Plus!” pronounces a word or phrase for you so that you can hear how it is supposed to sound. It also, like many programs, includes games and quizzes that test your vocabulary.

But “TriplePlay Plus!” doesn’t just talk at you, it expects you to answer, and it won’t let you off the hook until you do.

Demonstrating the program, company staffer Larry Rothenberg called up a screen full of household objects. He clicked on one to hear it pronounced, then, speaking into the kind of microphone that can be plugged into most Windows-equipped computers that have an audio board, he pronounced the word back into the computer.

“Mesa,” he said, giving the Spanish for table.

The computer just sat there.

“I think my accent is not quite good enough,” said Rothenberg, explaining that the company purposely made the program a tough taskmaster to give students a true feel for how the language should sound.

“Mesa,” he said again, this time giving the “e” more of an “ay” sound. The program rewarded him with a “beep” and allowed him to move on to the next word.

“It’s not supposed to completely replace moving to the country or all the classwork you do in a language,” Rothenberg said. “But it can make you pronounce the language the way it’s supposed to be done, and that way you get a feel for it. It makes you more comfortable with the language when you hear it in real life.”

“TriplePlay Plus!” is also available for English, French and German.

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