Digitize a Picture, It Lasts Longer

PC, at first, stood for “personal computer.” Then, with the advent of the Internet and e-mail, it’s become a “personal communicator.” Now it can also stand for “photo center.”

By adding a scanner, photo-quality color printer, a digital camera and some software, a Windows PC or Mac can be a virtual photo studio. A scanner can turn prints and, in some cases, negatives into computer files that can be edited and printed out.

Compared with old-fashioned film, digital cameras have several advantages and a couple of major disadvantages. One advantage is that they don’t use film, so once you have all the hardware you need, you don’t have to spend any money on film or developing.

You also don’t have to wait for your pictures to come back from the lab. Just take the picture, transfer it to your PC or Mac and print it out. Or you might decide not to bother printing it after you preview it on your PC screen. Some cameras even have built-in color displays that let you view the pictures before they leave the camera. A few have video outports that let you view them on a TV.

In addition to making prints, you can post your snapshots on a Web site or e-mail them to your friends, loved ones and prospective loved ones.

Another advantage of digital cameras is that they come with photo-editing software that lets you retouch, re-size or crop the picture. It’s like having your own airbrush. You can get rid of blemishes or even remove your “ex” from that holiday family photo.

But there are some clouds among all these silver linings. Digital cameras are much more expensive than most film cameras, the quality of the images are nowhere near as good and the process of uploading them to the PC, editing the images and printing them can be very time consuming.

Although they don’t need film, digital cameras do need memory to store your photos. Most digital cameras have some internal memory, and many can accommodate additional memory cards that you insert into the camera. Typically, they come with about 2 megabytes of “digital film”--generally 32 pictures worth--and you can buy additional “flash memory” cards for about $85.

Some cameras include a PCMCIA card that lets you insert the flash memory into a notebook PC, making it very easy to transfer the image. A few cameras, including the Canon PowerShot 600, use an optional PCMCIA hard disk that can store thousands of pictures. Sony Corp. this summer will introduce two digital cameras that record pictures directly onto a floppy disk. But most cameras transfer pictures to your PC or Mac via a supplied serial cable. At the heart of most current digital cameras is a CCD (charge-coupled device) that senses the electronic images passed to it by the camera’s lens. The number of pixels in the CCD determines the maximum resolution of the images. The more pixels, the better the resolution. Instead of a CCD, some cameras coming out during the next year will use a CMOS Active Pixel Sensor (APS) technology that is less expensive, more energy-efficient and smaller than CCDs.

Today’s entry-level cameras typically operate at the same resolution of a VGA PC display 640 by 480 pixels (307,200 total), but if you’re willing to pay more, you can get more pixels and, therefore, better resolution.

Kodak’s new CD120 Zoom Digital camera, which costs about $1,000, for example, is able to sense 836,400 pixels, which gives you a noticeably better image. It’s also a pretty nice camera with a built-in color display and a 3-to-1 zoom. But, as good as it is, the quality of its images is not as good as what you get with even an inexpensive film camera. Kodak and its competitors do offer cameras in the 6 million pixel range, but at prices starting higher than $25,000, they’re only for professionals.

The 640 by 480 cameras, like Hewlett-Packard’s PhotoSmart Digital Camera, start at about $400 and produce snapshot-quality images that are adequate for use on Web pages or for printing small photos. The image quality from low-cost cameras, however, deteriorates rapidly with prints that are larger than about 4 by 6.

I’m much happier with the photos I’m getting from the 570,000 pixel Canon PowerShot 600, but the camera, which doesn’t even have an LCD preview device, costs nearly $1,000.

Olympus offers a pair of very impressive digital cameras that have a color preview and review LCD and, unlike some models, actually look and feel like a real camera. The D-200L (about $599) has an image resolution of 640 by 480 and 2 megs of memory. I’m not ready to spend $899 for a digital camera, but if I were, I’d probably go for the Olympus D-300L that I tested. It has a resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels, auto focus, comes with 6 mega of RAM and produces pretty good pictures. The software, which takes only a few minutes to install, is very easy to use.

If you’re looking for something really small, consider the Panasonic CoolShot at about $400. Tiny enough to fit in one hand, the camera produces surprisingly good pictures. Data is stored in a 2-megabyte flash memory card that comes with an adapter so that it can be read by any notebook PC with a PCMCIA slot. Toshiba recently announced an equally small camera. Both the Toshiba and Panasonic models, however, do not have a flash, which limits them to outdoors or well-lighted rooms.

Before investing in a digital camera, consider using a regular camera and a scanner. You’ll still have to pay for your film, but the quality of the scanned images will be a lot better. The EasyPhoto reader from Storm Software costs less than $200 and produces pretty good images. HP’s new $499 PhotoSmart scanner does a good job on prints and a very good job with negatives and slides, which are scanned at 2,400 dots per inch.

Even dedicated photo printers aren’t as good as regular prints, but they’re getting better every year. You can now get reasonably good prints using a good color ink jet printer like the Epson 800 Color Stylus, the Hewlett-Packard 693 or the Lexmark 7000 Color Jetprinter.

You’ll get even better results with a special photo-quality printer such as the Panasonic Digital Photo Printer ($449), which uses photo-sensitive paper that costs about 75 cents for each 3-by-5-inch photo. HP’s recently released $499 PhotoSmart Photo Printer uses special inks and paper to give you pictures that look good but are still short of what you get from the photo lab. And Canon today will announce that it’s rolling out a new line of photo-quality Bubble Jet printers.

Printing your photos on a PC will save you a trip to the photo store, but it won’t save you a lot of money. The special papers and ink needed for near-photo-quality images can cost as much as professional developing. Supplies for the HP Photo printer, for example, cost about $1 per 4-by-6 glossy print. If you’re willing to sacrifice a bit on image quality, you can save a lot by using regular ink-jet paper that costs about 2 cents a sheet. If you mount the print in a photo album behind a clear plastic sleeve, you’ll wind up with a glossy appearance at a fraction of the price.

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Lawrence J. Magid can be reached via e-mail at magid@latimes.com. His World Wide Web page is at https://www.larrysworld.com