If you shoot film and want to get into high quality, low cost imaging, Photo CD's the way to go. Although it's never caught on as big as Kodak hoped it would, it's still very much alive and provides a viable alternative to scanning your images.

Photo © Eastman Kodak Co., All Rights Reserved Unfortunately, the art of scanning is not easily learned and can sometimes be downright frustrating...even infuriating. I'm not getting into it now because there's even a bigger problem if you scan, especially if you're a prolific photographer or have an enormous backlog of slides or negatives you want to input. A huge amount of storage space is needed, as some scanned images can result in double-digit MB file sizes.

Of course you can buy an auxiliary removable media drive to increase your storage space. But even with a removable drive, you're going to have quite a collection of disks if you start transferring everything you want to work on at some time in the indefinite future. And finding your pictures on them won't be easy, either.

Enter Photo CD (or PCD). Here's the ideal way to transfer anything you like and not have to worry about how many removables it's going to take to store them. Not only that, but each picture is scanned at five different resolutions for you to chose from, depending on whether you want to display your photos on the web (low resolution), make up-to-5x7 prints (medium resolution) or do some stunning big blow-ups (high resolution).

And best of all, it's all done for you at your photo lab...and can cost as little as a dollar or so for each 35mm slide or negative (larger sizes cost more). You simply choose those you want transferred, and Kodak (or your lab) does the rest. You get back a shiny CD-ROM with little printed thumbnail pictures of everything that's on it.

If you don't use the Photo CD's full capacity of a hundred or so pictures, just bring that same disk back again at another time with more slides or negatives and say: "Fill 'er up!" Which is why your CD-ROM drive has to be capable of multi-session Photo CD, because little discrepancies occur between sessions and the drive has to be able to adjust to them. (By the way, I haven't come across a CD-ROM drive in the past few years that wasn't multisession, but check, just to make sure.)