In article , Martin Brown
wrote:

A bit like the later Kodak launch confusing professional grade PhotoCD
scanning .PCD with the newer poxy consumer grade PictureCD with the same
acronym. You only got caught out once and went and bought your own
scanner. Shame as PhotoCD was a very good service until they ruined it,
but you could not afford to take the chance of getting a disk with toy
low quality consumer grade scans half the time.

photocd was doomed from the start. it was proprietary and kodak was
restrictive on licensing it. few companies supported it and never
gained traction.

At the time it was very good if you needed existing material digitised.

plus, nobody wanted to buy a special player to watch
photos on a tv.

I agree. That TV player part was dead in the water. The PCD file format
and the archive quality of the media was for its time very innovative.

I suspect that without the train wreck that was PictureCD the
professional scanning service would have made it at least in the UK. The
technical quality was excellent and painless until they started randomly
returning crappy PictureCDs when you needed PhotoCDs.

photocd might have been innovative for the time but it was poorly
designed and poorly marketed and quickly obsoleted.

the clueless management had no idea what to do with it.