Las últimas noticias

Blubox Software Limited today announced its award winning software application, Blubox, had been selected by Tesco Photo to power Tesco Picture Viewer, beginning in February 2009.

Tesco Picture Viewer, distributed free with every photo-CD dispatched, provides Tesco’s customers with a unique and enhanced experience when viewing their digital photographs processed by the Tesco Photo Service.

The Blubox system is the world’s only digital image management solution which enables the user to optimise their images for more efficient storage and high speed sharing online.

Tesco, the UK’s largest retail chain provides a comprehensive range of photo printing services, ranging from traditional digital print processing to the production of digital photo albums and on-line photo storage for over 1 million customers each year.

The Tesco Photo Viewer will be powered by Blubox, the powerful digital imaging management application currently winning awards and accolades worldwide for its highly innovative and intuitive system for managing high-resolution digital photographs on the desk-top and web.

“We are very pleased to be working with the premier retail partner whose ethos is to provide its customers with the highest standard of service possible” says Peter Boswell, CEO at Blubox Software. “From February 2009, Blubox will contribute to the overall customer experience when they develop film and digital photographs with Tesco”

“Tesco are constantly looking at ways of improving on the existing high standard of service” said Kevin Martin of Tesco “and we are delighted we will be offering such an innovative and useful technology as Blubox to our customers”.

Blubox Software Limited today announced that it had signed an exclusive 2 year agreement with Mustek Ltd to market and distribute image-compression technology in South Africa.

Mustek, South Africa’s leading systems integrator, assembles and distributes the Mecer-branded range of PCs, notebooks and peripherals. In addition, Mustek stocks and distributes a range of other branded IT and related electronic products.

Blubox™ software compresses digital images by as much as 95% without any loss of quality.

“We’re very pleased to have reached agreement to market Blubox™ across South Africa on an exclusive 2 year basis, as well as Nigeria and Kenya on a non-exclusive basis” said David Kan of Mustek “and we’ll be using multiple channels to sell the software, including in-store retailing, bundled deals, pre-loading onto PCs and notebooks, and direct downloads from our website”.

Commenting on the deal, Peter Boswell of Blubox said “This is a milestone agreement in the global deployment of Blubox™ and we look forward to a long and fruitful relationship with Mustek”

“I like the idea of being able to store more information on my computer than I previously could because the archives allow storage on your computer as well. It's not merely for emailing easier or secure transport. It's a useful program and if you have loads of pictures on your computer it will free up lots of space, allowing you to store many more.”

...I found compressing the files easy and I like how you can still browse through the images once zipped which is something a lot of other programs don’t allow.

BluBox also lived up to its claims of maintaining the quality of the images as I compressed one of my photos to a ridiculously small size and saw no difference in quality once it was unzipped.

This is a great piece of software that any keen photographer should have purchased and installed on their computer asap...

...there's little doubting that Blubox has, to our knowledge, an unrivalled ability to shrink the file sizes of images.

... BluBox nonetheless is likely to be used for one task only, to bring down the size of image files. Fortunately it's a task it's quite brilliant at, and given the modest price tag for the software, it's a strong purchase for the enthusiastic amateur digital photographer.

Recommended

Blubox Software Limited announces that it has agreed with Samsung Semiconductor Europe Limited to provide its digital data compression technology, Blubox, to Samsung memory card partners and their customers across Europe on a free trial basis beginning in April.

The deal will see on-pack promotions for Blubox on memory cards and USB sticks powered by Samsung NAND Flash, and marketed by Samsung distributors using their own brands across Europe. The trial is expected to last for three months. The Blubox application (available online at www.blubox.com) compresses digital imagery by up to 95%.

Ken Jones, Vice President of Samsung Semiconductor Europe Ltd, added, “Samsung globally holds the lead position in the memory market. I see the fresh initiative of offering content on memory cards to be an important differentiating factor in the purchasing decisions of today’s discerning consumer. This agreement provides benefits to Blubox, Samsung, Samsung’s distributors, their retail partners and ultimately the consumer – a win for all.”

Blubox will be offered free to all Samsung customers for a 3-month trial period. After which, the service will be charged at less than £20.00. Blubox will generate revenue from those who extend their free trial into a product purchase or subscription. Revenue will be shared equally between Blubox and Samsung.

The first Samsung memory cards including the promotion will be available in the UK in April.

Compression is a straightforward way to ease the burden of multi-megabyte files, and is offered in several shapes and forms with Blubox. Laying claim to being the 'world's most advanced compression and imaging software for digital photographers', Blubox offers two types of compression - binary, or lossless 'zip' compression, and image, or 'lossy' compression.

The 'Binary' mode offers just one setting, yet the 'Image' mode allows the user to compress at either 'low', 'medium', 'high' or 'maximum', with the final file or folder producing a Blubox archive file of respectively decreasing size. The software also contains 256-bit AES encryption to guarantee the security of personal images.

The 'Image' mode does result in the emergence of JPEG artefacts when compressed on the higher settings. However, this is a small price to pay for the convenience of up to a 95% reduction in file size that can prove invaluable when sending images in bulk.

Blubox presents a clear user interface allowing a simple learning curve that even the novice-compressor can grasp easily.

What's more is that the .blu archives created can be read without the need of the Blubox software, thanks to the free Blubox viewer downloadable from blubox.com, and archived images can be previewed even when compressed at the highest setting.

A great value, simple-to-use compression solution.

92% Gold Award

With digital SLRs growing in popularity and compact cameras delivering larger image sizes, hard drives around the world are filling up with our photographic memories.

File compression is one solution, of course, but it's a big negative when you're after the very best in image quality, especially with so-called "destructive" formats such as JPEG that degrade in quality the more you alter the files.

BluBox seeks to address the problem by compressing files down to just a few hundred kilobytes with no loss of quality, and has the ability to expand them again to their original size.

It's a great idea and anyone who uploads images to photo-sharing sites will love it. It also makes uploading to Flickr, for example, much quicker because you can upload high quality JPEGs at a fraction of their original size.

Getting compressed images back to their original size was quick and there was no adverse affects in quality. It's a great tool that's so quick and easy to operate.

Picture Protection

You can employ BluBox to archive huge volumes of images and this is another failsafe if you're looking at good back-up options. Protecting archives with passwords is easy and the actual images are encrypted with 256-bit AES security. Unlike many compression tools - or uploaders for that matter - BluBox enables you to view pictures in full screen while they're encrypted and compressed. you don't need a separate photo organiser because BluBox does a great job of offering the types of features found in more costly programs such as Serif's AlbumPlus.

There's also the BluBox viewer, which is available as a free download from the Web site. This enables you to send archives to your friends and family, who can then unzip your archives and view a substantial number of images in just one email. Whether it's a photo-sharing site or email, Blubox is a speedy solution to cutting down file sizes and at £20 you can't go wrong. This one comes highly recommended.

Verdict

No hassle and produces great results 89%

Due to the success of digital photography you may never again buy another roll of film - but that doesn't mean your digital photographs can be stored for free. Even mobile phones can pack a 5Mp camera and all that crisp resolution needs megabyte after megabyte of extra hard drive space.

Worst of all, when you come to exchange an entire digital photo album across the net you really can't expect granny to wait while her flyblown connection wrestles with multiples of hundreds of megabytes.

There's a simple solution to all this kerfuffle of course. Compress the files and you'll not only save HD space but a more diminutive file is far better suited for easy sharing.

Blubox offers a file-compression solution specifically for digital pictures, using its own compression format to render even the most gargantuan image folder relatively miniscule in mere moments.

Testing Blubox's claims to offer swift-and-easy compression of up to 95 percent couldn't have been easier. The program's interface is straightforward, comes backed up with detailed yet largely unnecessary help files and you can either just drag-and-drop individual images into a new folder within the program or just access one that you've already made.

Our original set of Jpegs took up 210,765,992 bytes of space and, with the program compressing to a medium setting we were provided with an impressive 76,359,387 byte '.blu' file. The same folder compressed to maximum became 12,433,727 bytes in size. This isn't so much a quart fitting into a pint pot as a generous gallon in a thimble.

For reasons of image quality you wouldn't use Blubox to compress a set of highly detailed images quite so viciously, but the test proves the program's mettle.

Blubox is fast and effective, enables users to easily add password protection to their files and can even be used to view images after they have been compressed.

While it would be handier if Blubox could handle more than the .blu and .zip formats you won't find deeper compression for quite such a decent price.

Blubox offers a file-compression solution specifically for digital pictures.

Verdict

Since Jpegs are already compressed files, simply using a standard zipping program won't work. Blubox offers a slick solution specifically for digital images and gives more than impressive results with a minimum of quality loss. It's time to sort those albums out once and for all.

Will Johnston