Photo CD resolutions

[frontier02]

Harryed: nothing to do with the topic, but you live in a beautiful place. I was stationed there in 65-66, and my 2 sons were camping at Deception Pass last week. One son lives in Olympia and the other in VA. As I work for the Navy, I get up to the Northwest quite a bit -- Silverdale, Bangor, Bremerton, Everett, etc.

[harryed]

frontier02,

You sure are right about this corner of the world. We spent a few days camping at Deception Pass this summer too. I also work for the Navy and can't imagine a better place to live and work.

[Wildman]

Me too... retired in Coupeville seven years ago from San Diego. This is a very photogenic place. Folks who only visit during the summer miss out on the beautiful misty winter scenes on this beautiful place.

[Alan T]

johncudd wrote:

what resolution is the photos at when they put them on a photo cd?

On the Photo CDs I've had done here in the UK from film recently, there are folders of jpeg images containing....

Large: 1536x1024, approx 250-500KB;

Medium: 768x512: approx 100-200KB;

Small: 384x256 : approx 30-60KB.

There's also "thumb" and "tiny", even worse.

None of these formats will remotely approach the quality you'd get from a 3Mpixel digital camera, but of course you'll still have your SLR negatives. To get the best digital images out of your negatives, and to surpass even a very cheap digicam, you'll have to buy a filmscanner for several hundred dollars, and invest lots of effort in getting the scans right. Or you can pay for photographic enlargements from your negs.

I started in digital 5 yrs ago as you're doing, with my old film SLR. I bought a filmscanner, and I saved jpeg images around 3600x2400; 1-2MB, i.e, about 4 timesas many pixels as the 'large' PhotoCD resolution. I got excellent results, but the work involved in scanning and twiddling was enormous. Dust is a big problem. It's like doing your own photographic processing, but less messy. Once I had a 3Mpixel Olympus and then a 5Mpixel Casio digicam, I soon got excellent results much more easily, and my SLR kit went into retirement.

If I were you I'd a get a cheap but flexible digicam, and start experimenting with it straight away, with a view to comparing its results with your PhotoCDs from your film SLR. I only go back to film now with the surprisingly good throwaway 35mm cameras that I issue to my family for holidays when I don't trust them with a cheap digicam. I get a set of prints and a PhotoCD via my local camera shop. This summer I bought for 128 ukpounds an excellent 3Mpixel Jenoptik 3.1z3 digicam, and lent it to the same family members, and the results are far superior. It hasn't got the controls of a better digicam or an SLR, but I still carry it around myself quite often because it can go everywhere, which my big digicams and my SLR can't.

Good luck