I find it difficult to decide on a best course of action or purchase. Right now, the easiest thing to do with ordinary photos is to have them processed, and if you want to manipulate them, have a photoCD or Flashpix disk made. It appears to me that to avoid resolution problems in digitized photos (as in making an 8x10) only PhotoCD will do. I see hints that Flashpix lets one select parts of the total bitmap to work on, but if so not all finishers seem to know about it. I just sent off my first rollof film for finishing and digitization and in view of the above I selected PCD over flashpix. Was I wrong? If so let me know quick and I may be able to change the order.Thanks Allen

-- Allen Scher (allen_scher@msn.com), June 15, 1998

Answers

Welcome to the forum, sorry so long to answer you. I think you've got it right for now. The mega-pixel cameras are only good enough to print 5x7 as of right now. The BEST way to go is to continue building your library as 35mm film, and getting Photo-CDs made as necessary. You can then convert files to FlashPix as needed. This is actually not a bad work flow if you want to do simple retouching like taking out scratches, basic tonal correction and the like after which you can burn a cd with a compressed and uncompressed version of the perfected FlashPix file. Keep in mind you will need some type of removable media to transport your files or you will need to invest in your own CD-burner.

With this workflow you will have an image library consisting of a film original, a Photo-CD representing as closely as possible the original film, and an optimized FlashPix file.

The problem with this workflow is that, in my experience it still requires pretty hefty hardware. Two products that MIGHT work on consumer machines are Kai's Photo Soap, and LivePIX.

Hope that helps.

Martin

-- Martin Rigby (mrigby@iname.com), June 23, 1998.