Two years ago I bought a Kodak DC240 digital camera. Jeremy had one about which (in typical Jeremy fashion) he evangelized tirelessly. I borrowed his and liked it enough to spend $500 for one of my own.

Digital photos are convenient for web-related tasks. They're less convenient when you want a physical print of the photograph. It is possible to use a color inkjet printer and special photo paper to obtain prints from digital photos. I don't like the results produced by this method.

At the Costco in Tualatin, and likely in many other Costcos throughout the country, is a Kodak self-service area consisting of envelopes, touch-screen computers, and drop-off spots. These kiosks for most often uesd for normal film processing, but they can also be used to get digital photos processed.

The touch-screen devices include two card readers: one for CompactFlash and one for SmartMedia.

To begin the process you slide your Costco membership card through a slot to the right of the touch-screen. A menu of processing options appears, one of which is "4x6 prints from digital". After selecting this option you are prompted to place your memory card into the appropriate slot.

While the reader copies your photos to its hard drive (which took a two or three minutes for 191 photos from my card), you are allowed to browse through thumbnails of your photos, displayed twelve per page. A warning symbol appears if the photo is likely to make a poor print (due to resolution, etc.). Since I've taken most of my digital photos at 640x480 I see this warning often.

Initially none of the photos are selected for printing. There are buttons to "select all photos" and to "deselect all photos". Or, you can browse from screen-to-screen selecting which photos you'd like to print. This is a slow process while the photos are being copied from the card, but speeds up significantly when the copying is finished.

You may select up to forty photos per order. If you have more than forty photos to process, you must repeat the process from the start (including the copying from the memory card to the hard drive).

There appear to be restrictions on what formats may be printed. The kiosk recognized my 640x480 and 1280x960 images, but claimed that a JPEG of a scanned photo was in an unrecognized format. I believe it should be possible to process scanned photos. I've ideas on how to fool the machine, and will try to process some scanned photos soon.

After selecting your photos, you pull a standard photo deposit envelope from the rack and scan its bar-code via a reader at the bottom of the touch-screen. Tear off the tickety thing, seal the envelope, and off you go!

The prints are available in five days and cost $0.24 each.

How well do the prints turn out? They're not going to convince anyone for which quality is of the utmost importance. There are some aliasing problems (jaggies) along smooth edges (a placemat on a table, for example), dark colors (especially blacks and browns) have strange artifacts in them sometimes, and most of the pictures don't look drisp -- they have a sort of blurred look to them. Of greatest concern is that some of the pictures get cropped during processing. A section along the edge each photo does not get printed. I'm not sure why this would be, but it might cause problems if you have carefully framed a shot with very small margins.

Here is an example of the single picture that I have at 1280 x 960. (Images at 640 x 480 are not as crisp.) Click a thumbnail for a full-sized picture.

Digital camera	Scanned print
54k	52k

For my purposes, making prints from digital photos at $0.24 each is a bargain.

On this day at foldedspace.org

2005 — The Rules of Catfight Club   The first rule of Catfight Club is, you do not talk about Catfight Club.

2004 — Automatic Withdrawal   U.S. Bank just raised the monthly fee on my checking account from $5 to $7. You might think that it's silly to quibble over 6-1/2 cents a day, but that's the final straw. I'm outta there.

2003 — The Hours   It's not that I don't have anything to write about, it's just that I'm feeling unfocused. You know?