I go to wally world myself

 

A friend of mine who does wedding photos on the side takes his digital memory cards to Costco to print. He said they do a very good job much cheaper than he can do it with a typical inkjet printer.

Don't know what Costco uses to print things but I suspect due to the huge volume they do every day, they probably have decent machinery and possibly more important, always fresh toners. A friend of mine who used to work on Kodak commercial photo printers said the key to good quality prints was to always use fresh good quality toner. High volume printers he said usually used fresh toner and the difference was noticable.

As far as digital storage. DO NOT TRUST USB or Flash memories for important things. They are better than they used to be but they 1) Have a finite read write life cycle(ie they get flakey if used a lot) and 2) They often fail for no apparent reason. I have had 2 of my relatively new flash memories diasppear all or some of the files on them.

I was reading an Enjunear magazine the other day and it said for high volume storage, Tape is the best, but since most of us don't have tape archives, a removable USB Hard Disk drive is a very reliable option. They are huge now and relative cheap. You can store 1Tbyte for less than $100 easy.

One gotcha with any technology is that it changes over time. So be sure to transfer data to new media as you upgrade your computers past a certain point. For example my old Win 98 PC and accessories no longer are compatible with XP/Vista/Win7, duh. So I have to figure out how to transfer upwards or make sure my Win98 never dies.

CDs and DVDs have a finite shelf life. The better quality ones have more stable dyes but over time even those can fail in bits and bytes. Of course a grubby kid can scratch one into oblivion in a heart beat. BTW, I have read that the CD +R are more reliable due to the write method used having better error correction and stability. Supposedly CD/DVD have a shelf life of anywhere from a couple years to a decade or so, depending on quality.

So far both of my portable USB hard drives have been error free. One is Western Digital, the other is Maxtor, both old reliable names in the business.

BTW if I was going to print at home for serious stuff, I would get one of those Xerox Phaser printers. The printer is not cheap, at least $1K. They use wax toner which is expensive($400/all colors refills) but gives such a better quality print and finish. I read once and concur, that a single page with a regula inkjet costs about $1, so the wax printer doesn't look so bad if you are into high volume at home printing. Once a customer of mine made printers and the company I was working at made a presentation with the Phaser. All the customer engineers looked closely at the presentation and asked us why we didn't use their printers to print it. The differnce in quality was so noticable, that we got stuck with our feet in several orifices.

Good Luck,

Jim Henderson

 

Either route you go you can make the photos last if you be sure to use acid free paper and acid free sleeves for the album. Long as the photos have acid free paper and sleeves against them it will help protect them. I have a photo album I did of my airshow photos taken back in 2001 and it looks like the day I made it.

 

I know Walgreens uses the same process and equipment for film as they do for digital.

You can either take them in on a jump drive,,, or upload them onto their system.

Then you can either pick them up at the store,,, or for .02 more, have them shipped to your house.

I can't drive to the store for that,,, so I send them over electronically and have Walgreens ship them back home.