Re: photos
shannon said:
One thing everyone should be aware of though, If you want a picture on paper for a scrapbook or albumn and you want the pic to last a lifetime, have your digital pics developed professionally. The ink in most of our home printers is not archival ( it has acids in it ) and the pics will eventually deteriorate and may even harm the albumn or scrapbook you've put them in. I believe the companies who supply our inks are becoming aware of this problem. Hopefully, in the not too distant future, we won't have to worry about our treasured pics fading away
Shannon
Shannon makes a great point, for your better photos definetly get them processed.
Something that not everyone is aware of these days, photo labs no longer use traditional methods for printing a photo, at least not the updated ones. Your film is developed, then the negative is scanned and converted to a digital image. It is then printed by the photographic printer from the scanned image, this is why most places today offer services such as red-eye reduction.
All this means that bringing your digital pics into a developing center actually avoids them the trouble of developing the film and scanning the negatives. The remainder of the process and quality is identical to printing photos from film (resolution aside). Most places will accept CDs, memory cards, floppies and even email/website submissions.
Once the novilty is gone, digital prints will be more economic than film. At the moment they cost around the same. I pay $0.22 per 4x6 print, a little less if I bring 20 or more to get printed at once.
Even now however, considering you get to choose the photos you want printed, getting your digital shots printed is often cheaper than having to buy ink and photographic paper for your own printer. And the results will convince you for sure.
Giancarlo