Hewlett-packard Development Company, L.P.

Hewlett-packard Company

Yoav Epstein

Kirkpatrick W Norton

Kirt Alan Winter

Hoang Nhu

William C Hilliard

A digital still camera is used for taking and storing digital representations of a plurality of images. A printer, such as an ink jet printer or a laser printer, is used for generating graphical representations of selected ones of the plurality of images on a preselected print media such as a paper. A flash memory card, floppy diskette, direct data link or some other data transfer scheme is used to transfer the digital representations of the plurality of images from the digital still camera to the printer. The printer includes programming for generating a combination proof sheet and order form. The combination proof sheet and order form can include an array of thumbnail images and a plurality of image selection and/or image enhancement user designation areas such as bubbles to be filled in by the user with a pencil. The printer includes a scanner and related circuitry and software for scanning the combination proof sheet and order form to detect the user designation areas completed by the user. The programming in the printer thereafter causes it to generate at least one final print sheet with the images and enhancements designated by the user on the combination proof sheet and order form. The proof sheet and order form can be used to designate the number of final prints of a selected image, the size and/or cropping of the prints, the brightness, color balance, background, borders and so forth.

System and method for printing and scanning a user-completed digital still camera image proof sheet and order form

A method and apparatus for manipulating digitized images stored as variable length encoded bitstreams such as JPEG format in a manner that reduces memory and processor resource requirements. A prescan means sequentially decompresses the bitstream to identify the location of encoded pixel image areas. Designated ones of these locations are recorded or stored in a prescan table. After the prescan operation has been performed on the image, image manipulations such as rotating, cropping, and zooming can be performed on a selected portion of the image by directly accessing only the encoded pixel image areas to be manipulated, without the need to sequentially decode and store all the encoded image areas in order to locate the ones of interest.

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San Diego, CA, United States of America

Yoav Epstein