Newly developed digital camera, RICOH DC-1 has unique features of various recording modes such as still image, still image with sound, motion pictures, and sound only. Specifically for the realization of recording and playing back of both still and motion pictures, newly developed technology was used. That is, digital image processor, IPP(Image Pre-Processor) and LSI to fast compression/decompression, read/write to and from memory card. Still image can be record and played back in full frame at vertical resolution of 400TVlines. Also by means of 5 line processing, frequency response of signal can be most properly adjusted, and by upgrading of color reproduction, high quality image is obtained. Motion pictures is record/played back by Motion JPEG method and is processed at the very fast speed of 60 fields per second.

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A relationship between bitrate and picture quality is a major issue of interest for digital broadcasting sevices. Since picture quality in digital coding depends largely on such picture characteristics as spatial detail and motion, estimation of picture quality of TV program material requires statistical analysis. We have defined "criticality", a quantitative measure of difficulty for digital coding, to analyze picture quality of TV programs statistically. We estimated desired bitrate for digital broadcasting system based on user requirements using statistical analysis of criticality.

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