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A group of six digital still camera makers and printer vendors, including Sony and Hewlett-Packard, have jointly proposed a new industry standard that allows images recorded by a digital still camera to be printed out without using a computer, they announced on Monday.

The DPS standard--which is a name, not an acronym--is being proposed by Canon, Sony, HP, Fuji Photo Film, Olympus Optical, and Seiko Epson.

Previously, each manufacturer used a proprietary method for printing pictures directly from their digital still camera, making it difficult for users to mix equipment from different vendors.

Coming Soon

The first version of the standard is expected to be released by February next year, said Nobuaki Sakurada, a Canon representative, at a news conference in Tokyo on Monday.

The DPS specifications are expected to be adopted on mobile handsets' digital cameras in the near future, and ultimately storage vendors will be able to develop DPS-compliant products, they said.

DPS, originally developed by Canon, HP, Seiko Epson, and Sony, is written for USB connections with Picture Transfer Protocol as data transfer protocol, they said.

The standard has been designed for scalability and simplicity, using the same interface for all cameras. After a USB cable is connected between a camera and a printer, the user chooses an image on the camera's LCD monitor. By simply pressing a button on the camera, a printer responds and prints out the image. Advanced functions contained in higher-end cameras can be operated by an extended user interface, Sakurada said.

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