Making a digitized photo

There are a bunch of methods you can use to make a digitized photo to send me via e-mail. You don't need a scanner or a digital camera!

• Floppy Disk / Photo processing - Both Konica and Kodak offer a very economical means of getting your photos on floppy disk. For somewhere between $4.00 and $10.00 you can have either of these two services put your photos (24 to 36 photos) on floppy disk at the time of your initial film processing. I know there are also other film processors that will do this but I'm afraid I'm unsure who they are. If you let me know I will happily add them to my list. Both Konica and Kodak will also supply software on the diskettes that you can use to view the pictures and convert to .jpg or .bmp formats.
• Photo-CD - For a bit more money you can also have Kodak put the pictures on a Kodak photo-CD. These pictures will be professional quality (assuming that your photoghapy is good to begin with) and will cost a bit more. I don't know if they come with software for viewing or not. Not all of the photo retouching software sold for home use will read the format Kodak uses.
• Snappy (and other video capture devices) - If you have a video camera you can get devices like the "Snappy" that connect to your computer's parallel port (some are actually plug in boards) which also connect to your camcorder or VCR. You can "snap" a still photo while viewing the video. This takes practice, however.
• Scanners - Scanners have come way down in price! I'll bet you that you know someone who has one. There are also services that you can go to who will scan your photos for you (for a fee).
• Digitized cameras - As you probably know by now, there are cameras that take photos and store the pictures in digitized format ....that's right no film required. These are becoming popular and although my friend who purchased a low-end version a few months back was not able to get a very good picture when he brought it to our house, I'm told some people are actually getting pretty good results.
• Personally of all the methods listed above I would recommend most of you to try the first method - Floppy Disk / Photo processing. That's how I've gotten most of the photos on my web site (and I have a scanner and a Snappy).