Photo Finishes

By JOSHUA QUITTNER

The sheer mass of Baby Clementine and Otto the Puppy photographs was threatening to swallow the Quittner household. Our refrigerator was already covered with images of the shiny-faced dictator and her sock-eating companion. Would the microwave disappear next? Would our home explode in an updraft of glossy prints and curly brown negatives? I needed to move my clan to the clean, neatly organized world of digital photos. The trick was to do it cheaply.

I avoided digital cameras, which bypass film and shoot directly to disc, because the sub-$500 models are sub-snuff in the quality department. That left low-cost scanners (which convert paper photos to digital bits) and Picture CD, a new photo-to-digits service from Kodak and Intel that's being introduced this month.

I started by testing two inexpensive scanners: UMAX's Astra 2100U and Astra 2000U (each sells for $129, street price). I assume the UMAX folks sent along the 2000U to demonstrate the obvious superiority of its brother. The machines are nearly identical, and do 36-bit color scanning relatively fast (about 30 sec. for an acceptable 300-dpi resolution of a snapshot). The difference is that the 2100U has buttons on the front for one-click scanning or copying. (Yes, copying. Just drop a document or photo on the scanner, hit the copy button, and the image transmits directly to your printer.) The scanners come with an array of software that allows sophisticated editing, archiving and e-mailing of images. But don't expect to be able to do all this without studying the manuals.

By contrast, the Kodak-Intel Picture CD is simple and fun. You drop off your 35-mm or APS film at a participating photo center (Walgreen's, Wal-mart, CVS, Target or Eckerd Drug, to name a few) and pay $10 or so more than you would for print-only processing. The Picture CD package you get back includes a contact sheet, a set of paper prints and a CD with digital renderings of your photos. Put the CD in your computer's CD-ROM drive, and you'll see the images displayed in an interface that looks like a magazine. A table of contents that lists tools runs along one side; thumbnails of your photos run along the other.

What's great about Picture CD is the terrifically easy-to-use software for editing your photos that comes with it. Cropping, improving the contrast, removing red eye and even sending your images via e-mail are so simple that instructions are unnecessary. Also cool: each disc includes free demo programs (they will change every 60 days) that allow you to have fun with your photos. One made it simple to swap heads, for instance. Another popped in cartoon characters.

The only problem I ran into came from clueless photo finishers. My local photo store claimed it sold Picture CD, but it turned out I was being offered another Kodak service, called Photo CD--a photos-to-disc process geared toward professionals that has been around for seven years, costs more than twice as much and requires users to have their own image-editing software. Another issue: Mac users will have to wait until summer's end for Picture CD. It may be worth it. I found that Picture CD gave me as much technology as I needed. The only thing I lack now is a digital display on the fridge.

For more on digital photography, visit our website at timedigital.com Questions for Quittner? E-mail him at jquit@well.com