Digital Camera Reviews Overview Epson PhotoPC 550 AGFA EPhoto 307 Canon Powershot 350 Casio QV 700 Kodak DC200 Olympus D-320L Ricoh RDC-300Z Sony Mavica FD5

By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
March 27, 1998; Page N44

If you're interested in getting some photos in a digital format to e-mail to friends but aren't the early-adopter type, don't worry: Many photo developers have gotten into the digital imaging act also, developing your photos on a floppy disk in addition to the usual 4-by-6-inch glossies.

This process costs $5 or so extra and only takes a few minutes – just a little longer than it takes to feed the film into a negative scanner. (But if your developer farms the job out to another site, it might take them an extra day or two to get your disk; ask if you're not sure.) The image-viewing programs included on these disks, usually offered in Win 95, Win 3.1 and Mac versions, can be a little clunky, but they generally let you convert your images to standard formats, such as JPEG (named after the Joint Photographic Experts Group that developed it).

Ritz Camera and Safeway, for instance, charge $5 to have your roll of film scanned and stored on a floppy disk; Ritz can also upload your pictures to its Internet site, http://www.ritzcamera.com/home.html. Seattle Filmworks, a mail-in film developer, charges $4 to $6 to scan your film to disk, depending on the number of exposures. (For $2, it can also print out a digital image as "real photograph," to use its Web site's term, http://www.filmworks.com.)

Keep in mind the limitations of the images offered by these services. Most store images at 640 x 480 resolution, good enough for viewing onscreen but lousy in 8-by-10 printouts. For sharper resolutions, you'd need to use a digital camera or scanner of your own. More specialized photo-scanning services may not be much help; for instance, Penn Camera Exchange can scan in a photo with near-perfect quality for $5, but the resulting image file will take up 18 megs of disk space.

Unfortunately, if you're a technophobe anxious to escape cranky hardware and software, this isn't a guaranteed reprieve. After trying to view the scanned-in images from Ritz's service on a worthless old PC and having the included PhotoNet viewer program crash on me a few times, I tried to open it with a Mac's PC Exchange utility. I couldn't, and when I returned to the PC I was only met with an "illegal operation" error message. I took my disk back to Rtiz (not telling them about my little "experiment" with the Mac) and asked them to redo it, and things have worked fine. Well, so far.