Say Cheese: New Phone Also Takes Pictures

ATLANTA —  Dial the number, comb your hair, smile and say, “Cheese.” Talking on the telephone might never be the same after Luma.

The new picture phone allows callers to take black and white snapshots of themselves and transmit them to each other in a matter of seconds.

“My daughter visited a friend the other day and came home shocked that they didn’t have a dishwasher,” said Roy L. Elkins, senior vice president of marketing and development at Luma Telecom. “It’s gotten to the point that she thought every house had a dishwasher.

Concept Isn’t New

“In a few years, it’s going to be the same with picture phones. People will be surprised to find telephones that you can only talk on.”

The concept of picture phones is not new. At the 1964 New York World’s Fair, American Telephone & Telegraph introduced its experimental “Picturephone,” an expensive and complicated system that was heralded as a look into the future.

But the AT&T; Picturephone never caught on. It proved to be too costly and too unwieldy. The same goes for similar products that also have dazzled the public but failed to attract a wide following.

Along comes Luma.

The Luma phone is a rather uninspiring-looking piece of equipment. It weighs only eight pounds and comes equipped with a tiny, three-inch monitor and a small camera lens.

Gigantic Breakthrough

But Luma is a gigantic breakthrough in at least two important areas--it sells for thousands of dollars less than other products and it can be plugged into standard telephone jacks.

“Everything else that’s been out there has required special circuits or special rooms,” Elkins said in Atlanta, where Luma was making its trade show debut at the Eastern Telecommunications Showcase. “But this is a normal telephone, and by far it’s the least expensive.”

The Luma phone, which will be shipped to customers beginning in July, carries a retail price of $1,450--thousands less than its nearest competitor.

“This price is not out of range for a fairly significant portion of the consumer population,” Elkins said.

The Santa Clara, Calif., company hopes to sell this first Luma model to businesses and upscale residential customers. Elkins said a scaled-down “consumer product”--without some of the original features such as a speaker phone and large in-phone directory--will be available in 1987, probably at a lower price.

Luma uses a patented video modem that converts a video image into a series of sounds transmitted through phone lines. It uses a standard phone jack and electrical wall socket. Because Luma utilizes regular phone lines, rates are no higher for using the picture phone.

The small screen displays two images--the right side shows the user’s picture as photographed by an in-phone camera, while the left side shows pictures sent by the other party.

Callers snap their own photographs--or snapshots of documents or anything else that can be seen by the phone’s lens--by pressing a “send” button. The image is transmitted to the other party’s screen within seconds. A large picture takes 5.5 seconds; the smallest requires a second. The parties cannot talk while an image is being transmitted.

Luma can be hooked to an optional printer, VCR or TV monitor for a better look at the transmitted images.

Elkins said it is important that a caller cannot take a photograph of the person on the other end.

“You’re in control,” Elkins said. “If you’re in curlers in the morning and don’t want someone to see you, you don’t have to.”

Unlike more sophisticated systems, Luma cannot send live motion pictures. To do so would leave it unable to work on a regular phone line, Elkins said.

He said color technology is about two years down the road, and affordable full-motion video-phone technology, Elkins predicts, will not be seen until the turn of the century.