Physical pictures turned digital?

[august23]

I brought my friends cameras to the Kodak store to get developed (he uses disposables), andwhen I got my prints back, on the back it said "Get digital pictures, without a digital camera." Now is this feasible? Or simply a Kodak gimmick? Are they telling me they can take my handheld pictures, and turn them into full-fledged digital files for my editing pleasure? If so, how the hell do they go about that? Anyone have any info on that?

[Radtech1]

They scan the negatives at some point in the processing and burn the images onto CD. Costco has been doing that for quite a few years now. No gimmic, nothing mysitical.

Rad

[DavidW]

Many minilabs these days print by automated scanning and digital printing, rather than via direct exposure of the paper using the negatives and lenses. At this stage, the scans can be saved to CD-R - hence the digital pictures without a digital camera. The labs are going to be scanning anyway, and the CDs are a good upsell.

Even if they're not going to print digitally (are there many traditional minilab printers left these days, bearing in mind how many people are shooting digital?), they can still scan the negatives and sell you a disc. They have the advantage of being able to do this before the negatives are cut, which makes automated scanning easier.



David

[superdiver]

I have a bunch of photos of my kids that are negatives. I would like to digitze them. What is the best way to do this?

[tjburns]

bring them to ur local camera shop/walmart/drug store and tell them what u want

[PIXI_666]

iF YOU GOT A NEGATIVE SCANNER YOU COULD ALSO DO THIS, SCANNING "PRINTS" (oops caps) will make do to view a photo, but scanning negatives will give high res and big enough to fiddle in PS with :)

[ScottE]

I have a bunch of photos of my kids that are negatives. I would like to digitze them. What is the best way to do this?
The best way is to take them to a professional lab and have drum scan made. The cost and quality however will probably far exceed what you will use the scans for unless you are making huge prints.

The most economical way is to take the negatives to a commercial film processor and have them scanned to a CD, but the quality usually does not hold up for large prints.

If you are doing a lot of scans, the best compromise is probably to get a good film scanner. If you do enough scans the cost per scan is reasonable and the scanner is capable of producing files that can be printed quite large.