Imaging Briefs

Oakdale, Minn.— Media manufacturer Imation announced last week that it would enter the hot selling USB flash-drive market with a line of USB 2.0 devices. Drives with capacities ranging from 128MB to 512MB and featuring a patented swivel cap design that prevents users from losing the drive's protective cap will be available. The Swivel Flash drive reads data at 8MB per second and writes at 7MB per second. Imation will offer a free software download from its Web site for Swivel Drive owners that will give the drive public/private partitioning and password protection to prevent unauthorized access to data saved on the drive. The Imation Swivel Flash drives are shipping immediately with suggested retails of $105.96 for the 128MB drive, $172.22 for the 256MB drive and $335.89 for the 512MB drive.

Hannover, Germany— Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic) said that it would ship a 1GB SD flash memory card to the U.S. market in May. The 1GB card will be the highest capacity yet in Panasonic's SD portfolio. Panasonic said its 1GB card will have a suggested retail price of $499.99. The announcement was made at the CeBIT show, held here.

Upper Saddle River, NJ—H&M Systems Software's StudioLine Photo 2 digital imaging and archiving software tool entered the retail market last week, cutting shelf-space deals with CompUSA, Best Buy and Fry's. The agreements put StudioLine Photo 2 in 1,000 retail locations nationwide. The software, which retails for a suggested $49.99, can be used for photo editing, archiving and sharing digital images, in addition to creating Web galleries and burning CD/DVDs.

Vienna, VA.— Kiosk manufacturer Lucidiom and software developer Trevoli partnered last week to integrate Trevoli's Photo Finale suite of imaging software exclusively with all of Lucidiom's Automated Photo Machines (APMs) kiosks. Beginning with the release of the next generation APM called v2.0, this month, the Photo Finale image-viewing software will be provided free of charge on each Image CD created at the APM. As an upgrade, Photo Finale can be configured to display the photo retailer's logo, store information and Web site while providing a print-ordering wizard that is connected directly back to the photo retailer.

Hannover, Germany— Lexar Media added two new models to its JumpDrive line of USB flash drives at the CEBIT show, held here. The JumpDrive Photo features USB 2.0 connectivity, a 40x speed-rating, durable plastic housing and ships with Lexar's file recovery software, Image Rescue 2.0. It will ship in April with suggested retail prices of $89.99 (256MB) and $179.99 (512MB). Also in April, the company will ship the JumpDrive 2.0 Pro 80x with a minimum sustained read/write speed of 12MB per second. It will be available in capacities of 256MB, 512MB and 1GB, for $89.99, $189.99 and $349.99, respectively.