i've genuinely forgotten more than most people ever knew about the subject..

I've forgotten more than I ever knew about the subject.

I still have my old Canon A-1, but use it very rarely. The cost of film and developing if I take enough shots to justify getting it out is a major reason for not using it more often. There is no question that I can get much better pictures with it than with the cheap digital I've got, but I haven't found it too constraining to go pretty much all digital.

I'm currently stuck with an old 2.1 MP Fujitsu digital that was the best I could find that was only a little over my budget four or five years ago. The main objections, after the low resolution, are the lack of interchangeable (or real zoom) lenses and the completely inadequate flash power. Newer digitals in the same "shirt pocket(?)" size are up to the 5 MP or better range, but probably still have much the same limited lens versatilty and inadequate flash, although if sensors have improved they may allow a little better ASA-equivalent speed.

I'd love to have one of the newer digital SLRs, but there's that cursed budget thing...

Once I more or less "got digital" I found that many of my old film prints had begun to show some fading, so I've pretty much scanned them all to digital files and simply shredded the original prints. (There were a lot of them, and storage space was becoming a problem.)

After considerable experimenting, I settled on 300 dpi (color) scans as "sufficient" for my purposes, and with reasonable file size saved as "minimally compressed .jpg." That really is good enough to print at the 13 x 19 inch maximum I can get out of my inkjet printer, or to make reasonable crops for enlargement back to 8x10 or so. For "professional" grade archiving one might want to use a somewhat higher resolution scan, but file sizes do go up rapidly.

My 8 or 9 year old Epson flatbed will scan at a true 1200 dpi, but balks at a full-bed 8.5 x 14 inch color scan at that resolution due to filesize limits. The 1200 dpi color limit appears to be something like 8 x 9.5 inches, but I haven't really tried to pin it down. It "pretends" to scan at higher resolutions, limited to small areas, but I'm not sure I really believe the numbers above about 1200 dpi.

I will note that, ancient as it is, the dedicated flatbed scanner is a whole lot nicer to work with than the scanner in "her" mutlipurpose printer/scanner, although the maximum resolution for the multipupose is probably good enough for most purposes.

I use Photoshop Elements (2.0) exclusively, and it's reportedly preferred for photo work by some who have both it and the full Photoshop. About the only thing you can't do with "Elements" is work in CMYK color or make color separations for printing. Since few people have printers capable of printing color seps, it's not often a problem unless you work with a commercial publisher. Since Adobe created the new "CS" suite, Elements is not a cheap as it once was, but you can still - to some extent - get just the pieces of the CS suite that you need.

As a side note, I find 150 dpi scans more than adequate (probably a bit excessive) for archiving paper records like old income tax returns, and am in the process of scanning and shredding all my old paper archives.

John