The sheer mass of Baby Clementine and Otto the Puppy photographs was threatening to swallow the Quittner household. Our refrigerator was already covered with images of the shiny-faced dictator and her sock-eating companion. Would the microwave disappear next? Would our home explode in an updraft of glossy prints and curly brown negatives? I needed to move my clan to the clean, neatly organized world of digital photos. The trick was to do it cheaply.
I avoided digital cameras, which bypass film and shoot directly to disc, because the sub-$500 models are sub-snuff in the quality department. That left low-cost scanners (which...