A year or two back, I asked a photographer friend if he owned a scanner or if he planned to integrate digital images into his work.
'Nope,' he replied. 'I believe in the old American business adage which goes 'never buy what you can rent'.' It is not a bad idea. If you do not need to scan pictures regularly, why bother buying a scanner? Let someone with more experience and better equipment do it for you.
'Ah,' you say, 'why would I pay a service centre HK$200 to do a scan when I can buy my own scanner for just a few thousand dollars?' Damn good question. At least Kodak thought so.
The most obvious alternative to scanning is a Kodak Photo CD. Kodak Photo CDs are something that many people have heard of, but few have tried. After all, if they are so good, why are more people not using them? Another good question.
The Photo CD was introduced in 1990. At the time, Kodak was trying to hitch its wagon to what was sure to be the wave of the future, CDi.
Kodak's idea was to have users scan their photos on to CDs which could then be viewed on a television via a CDi player.
Beyond the rather impractical idea of making people sit around a TV whenever they wanted to look at snapshots, the CDi players were prohibitively expensive.