The digital details

By Tom Coakley, Globe Staff, 05/06/99

As photo companies rush to meet the mushrooming demand for digitized photos, consumers are facing more and more choices. That competition will help drive down prices and improve quality, but it also can be very confusing.

As you decide which service to use or product to buy, remember that the most important consideration is how you intend to use your digital photos. The resolution of the image and the size of its file are key to determining its quality if it is enlarged or printed.

Here's a review of some of the major services and products:

Photos on floppys

Kodak calls it the Picture Disk; Konica, the Picture Show. Both fit up to 28 pictures on a floppy. But because a floppy disk has storage for only 1.44 megabytes, the size of each photo is small, and the quality just average - Kodak's are about 400 by 600 pixels each.

Photo professionals say these files are perfectly fine for copying into computer-generated greeting cards, school projects, and the like, or for e-mailing. But when converted to 4 by 6 inch prints, they are not true photo quality.

The fewer photos you put on each floppy, the larger - and better quality - each photo is.

The software that comes on Kodak's Picture Disk and Konica's Picture Show along with your photos lets you crop, print and copy images for use in documents.

Of course, there are high-capacity disks like Zip disks - lots of new PCs come with Zip drives now. They hold 100 megabytes, so you can store lots of photos at a decent size on them.

The trend to sophisticated but easy-to-use processing equipment means that more stores are giving computer users the option of copying photo images to Zip disks or making photo quality prints from images on these disks.

Photos on CDs

Because compact discs have a storage capacity of 650 megabytes, each photo is larger than possible on a floppy, with greater resolution: more detail and brilliance of color.

The Kodak Photo CD provides high resolution images (up to 2,048 by 3,072 pixels) suitable for use by professional photographers, graphic artists, and others who make their living with photo images.

Each image also comes in more than one resolution. The lower resolution images - with fewer bytes - would give professionals the flexibility to send smaller image files over the Internet: files that would move faster, but still have enough resolution for use on a Web page or computer screen display.

At Noble Camera in Hingham, this kind of professional-style CD cost $12 for the CD and $1 per image scan (a photographic negative frame) if the images are put on the CD at the time the roll of film is processed. Putting cut negative and slide images on CDs costs as much as $2.70 per scan.

But Noble Camera also offers its own mid-range CD product called an Image CD for $13; it is less expensive than the professional Photo CD, but still suitable for large prints and desktop publishing.

Both of these discs can fit 100 or more high-resolution photos. You can bring the CD back a number of times and put more images on it for as low as $1 an image until the disc is filled.

At the same time, a CD product introduced in the Boston area just last month is the Kodak Picture CD ($10), designed to hold one roll of film, up to 40 images.

The photo resolution (1,534 by 1,036 pixels) is high enough to render photo quality prints up to a size of at least 8 by 10 inches. Picture CD also contains a wide range of extras, such as greeting card and sports card templates, and devices to produce better pictures and prints - you can reduce the dreaded ''red-eye'' effect sometimes caused by a flash and adjust images for brightness and contrast.

You can even go through your own personal film noir period, and change all of your color pictures into black and white.

Photos on the Internet

Kodak, Fuji and Konica all will store your digital photos on your own personal Web page - through each company's Web site - for 20 to 30 days so that friends and family can ooh and aah over the latest pictures of your dog. Or kids.

Under this service - available through your photo retailer - each company will store the photos on your page, and you'll get an access number and password that lets you get to it. Once there, you can e-mail your photos to others or give them your Web address so they can see the photos themselves. You also can download your photo files onto disks at various resolutions or order glossy prints of the online images.

The services cost about $7. For $1 you can buy a copy of a digital photo with the same resolution as Kodak's Picture CD images. And of course, there's a selling component: An option allows you to buy a mug, a T-shirt or a mousepad with your favorite photo on it.