The service, available to Car Design News' members, has been developed in conjunction with automotive design research consultancy Car Men.

For more information visit the Studio Photos section or the announcement page which gives more details about the service.

From the official Press Release:

Most car designers spend a lot of time looking for images of specific cars, details of some new model's tail lamp, or the side view of a particular class-leading competitor. Being able to compare vehicles or details by viewing the same image type for several different cars is the paramount feature of this new library.

The new service not only shows what is feasible to engineers, but enables verification of in-house proposals to ensure they are not derivative while demonstrating how advanced a design theme is relative to the same type of cars on the market.

Studio Photos is a large library of exclusively silver cars photographed in the same studio, using the same camera, and taken from the same angles; to always be directly comparable.

Presented with a seamless white background (so that the images are literally only of the cars), the photos are considered from a designer's perspective rather than the exaggerated views often seen in press packs or magazines.

There are 61 cars currently in the database, with 8 photos comprising 5 exterior and 3 interior shots at a size of 2048x1536 pixels (0.5 -1MB file size). These images can be printed in high-quality up to around 500mm wide and used as part of a full-size projection presentation or to highlight design detail elements.

All of the major new European market production cars are photographed at a rate of two per month and can be purchased online. The photos can be individually selected and immediately downloaded for an introductory price of 50 Euros each. Once purchased, the files are delivered to a specific Studio Photos Inbox, where each set can be downloaded as a Zip file.

This latest addition supplements images from all major auto shows from 2000-2007 and over 15,000 photos of automobiles and automotive design details already available on Car Design News’ extensive image database.

(Source: Car Design News)