E-Film Aims to Boost Image of Digital Photos

Digital cameras have become the hot party toy over the last couple of years, what with Sony continuing to drop its price and Nintendo’s Game Boy camera grabbing the youth crowd. But the images on some of these mid- to low-cost devices are grainy, while serious photographers complain the cameras don’t have enough options to be flexible enough for their work.

Enter the Electronic Film System, or E-Film, a small device that can be inserted into any standard 35mm camera and allows a photographer to take high-quality photographs.

Created and marketed by Costa Mesa-based Imagek Inc., the E-Film looks like a standard roll of 35mm film, but with an extended panel to cover the camera’s shutter area. A tiny imaging chip in the panel takes a digital snapshot as the camera’s shutter is triggered. The image is then stored in the device’s memory until it’s transferred to a PC or Macintosh, or into another device that can store such files.

“We’re really targeting the photo hobbyist who’s familiar with a personal computer,” said Robert I. Webber, president and chief executive of Imagek, a subsidiary of Costa Mesa research and development firm Irvine Sensors Corp. “We think it’ll be a hit, because owning [the E-Film] is like owning 10,000 rolls of film.”

Imagek says its drop-in cartridge, which stores 30 images at once, can be reused at least 100,000 times. The product, which is expected to be priced under $1,000, is set to launch in the first quarter of 1999.

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P.J. Huffstutter covers high technology for The Times. She can be reached at (714) 966-7830 and at p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com.