Fuji Photo CD: Never Again
I learned a lesson today, and I’m glad it was part of a test.
I’m an amateur photographer; I shoot 35mm film. (I also use a digital camera, but that’s another story.) One of the best purchases I’ve made is a Nikon CoolScan III film scanner. It’s outdated now, but I still love it. It turns a single 35mm negative into a 25MB+ TIFF file. (And I was impressed with 6 megapixel cameras!)
By the way, this is not a film vs. digital thing.
When I get a roll of film back from processing, I use the prints as sort of contact prints — that is, I use them to pick out my favorite shots. Then I scan the respective negative and use Photoshop to crop, clean, and generally fix the picture, which I then print out as (usually) a 5×7.
I use a terrific scanning program called VueScan that gives me many more options than Nikon’s annoying-to-use NikonScan software. But scanning at that super-high resolution takes time, especially when I use VueScan to make three or more passes to get the best quality.
So my idea was to get the photo place to do the scanning for me: a Photo CD.
Well, a Picture CD. Kodak has two kinds of CDs, you see. A PhotoCD holds one roll of film and has multiple resolutions of each image. It’s a high-end service. The newer Picture CD holds several rolls because it only stores one copy of each picture in a high-resoultion JPEG file.
I figured I’d check out the quality of the $8.00 Picture CD. Reviews I read indicated I would have good-quality scans — not as good as my CoolScan did, but more than good enough for Photoshopping and printing. The negatives would serve as my archive copy.
What I got back was crap. It was on a plain ol’ blank CD (Imation brand), and contained some junky Fuji-branded software to browse the images.
The images were terrible. Small (2MB), low-res, poorly scanned. Crap. The numbering system it uses puts the images out of order in the browser, and even though you can print an index print, it doesn’t tell you the file names.
Garbage.
Of course I have the negatives, and the CD is certainly adequate for picking out the photos I want to scan, but the idea of saving myself some time and effort went down the tubes.
One of these days I’ll try a Kodak-branded service. Preferably both Picture CD and PhotoCD. But Fuji? Forget it.
I will never again use a scanning service
