Photo Finishes

Which is better for making digital snaps on the cheap--scanners or Kodak's new Picture CD?

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...

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