Personal Dork Assistant

Costco has a digital picture

Costco has a digital picture service, where they can "develop" the digital pictures directly from the camera's memory card. And it's just about the same price as one-hour film development, which isn't too surprising since it looks like they both use the same machine. When I went to pick up the pictures, there was actually a sign posted apologizing for the unavailablility of one-hour film development, but they could still accept film reprints and digital media. That tends to confirm my suspicion that there is a chemical development front-end for the film, but the output stage is digital with a film scanner or direct digital input, all dumped to a photo-printer complete with thick, glossy paper.

4x6" seem to be a good size print for a two-megapixel image. I am now totally sold on digital photography. The image quality is more than good enough for casual shots and the convenience goes without saying. I set the white balance manually for most of the shots, which worked out well. The color saturation is very good, which you'd expect from a CCD. After all, linearity and dynamic range were why astronomers abandoned film for the CCD in scientific applications.

The problems with the pictures were mostly due to user error. Too many pictures came out blurry because I couldn't shoot with flash in the museums and churches and I couldn't hold the cameras steady enough. I really should've used the fill-in flash more aggressively, and I didn't figure out the night-time scenery flash feature until too late. A metering hold feature on the camera would've been useful and a way to save uncompressed data would be cool, but I can't complain about the camera, considering its size and convenience.