general digital camera question

[d56nut]

Hi Everyone,

I'm still new to underwater photography and I have a question about digital cameras. I know that you use a memory card in the digital camera to store the pics on. After you take all of the pictures can you take the memory card in to a camera shop (or a place like walgreens) and get prints of the pics? I love the quality of digital pics and being able to see your shots while in the water and decide if you want to keep them but I also want to be able to have a photo album of my shots at home for my non online friends to see. I know I can print some myself but it's an awful lot of ink to have to print a hundred pics! How do you go about getting them developed into prints? Thanks!!!

Michelle
d56nut@yahoo.com

 

[Dee]

There are several ways to get prints from your digital camera. Several store, ie., Eckerds, Walgreens, Wal-Mart, camera shops, etc. now print digital pics. Some of them use kiosks that allow you to insert your memory card, choose which pics from it you want and they'll print those. Another way is to download your pics into your PC, do any cleanup you need to do for improvements and burn them to a CD. You can now take this CD and have the pics printed. Or you can join one of the online places, ie. ofoto.com or shutterfly.com. They will host your pics for free and you can order prints of your pics as well as other merchandise with your pics on it.

I've seen prices anywhere from 25¢ to 99¢ per 4x6 picture among the places I mentioned.

 

[dmdoug]

Hi Michelle,

I personally own the Canon Powershot A40 with an underwater housing. During a recent trip in St Lucia over the course of the 7 days there were approximately 200 pictures taken and they were all worth developing.

The question that I was asking myself was whether or not the buying of ink was worth all the pictures that needed to be developed.

My wife and I decided to go into Costco and look at their prices. I believe that we spent about $30-40 for the photos. When you have them develop them you can take the disk in and have them print everything, or you can select the ones that you like the most. Either way some things that make the pictures are borders, matte finish and if they ask about color correcting I usually do not color correct. If the pics are color corrected they ususally turn out very blue....it is personal preference.

You can also look on line. Blacks phototgraphy offers an online service where you download the pictures into a file and they print them for you mailing you the results. Costs are negotiable and about the same depending on the service that you would like.

Dive safe,

 

[BOATS313]

I print my own at home and use the local photo shop. It depends on what you want to do with them It also depends on how good your printer, software and patience is. I do them at home for smaller prints, stuff for albums and give aways. I used the pro's for larger prints or ones I want to display. The photo store I go to uses a photo printer that uses some sort of laser or heat to set the ink and make them last longer and look better (or so they say). You can get a membership card with them and get cheaper prints .39 without the card or .29 with for a 4x6(last time I checked anyway). The shop claims that it's cheaper in the long run then buying the paper and ink, they could be right. I like the convinence of printing at home and have had good luck with it. I have seen some home printed pictures fade pretty bad, but that's if they are left out on display. You can always reprint if that happens.
Good luck either way,
Boats

 

[Finesse]

I have ( at the recommendation of another member ... TedJ ) taken the pictures I wanted developed to Costco ..... I'm amazed at the results. I too wanted a "coffee" table album and decided to print a 120+ photos at home would just take to much time , effort , ink and paper. Costco had them done in and hour and a half (don’t try that at home )

Costco uses (printing machines are in certain stores) a Fuji laser color printer and archival paper ..... The quality is incredible!!!

4x6 cost 0.19/ photo Which in many/some cases is much cheaper than film

5x7 0.69/photo

they go up to 12x18

We did a 5x7 album .... It was a tad expensive to do it that way (5x7) but it came out awesome!!!!

I've tried the Online developers but I have not been overly impressed....prints on the home printer (inkjet) came out far superior in our eyes

You can use your memory card or put them on disk ..... they accept all types of storage media…..you load the pictures and sizes you want …as mentioned above and they do the rest

 

[ssra30]

Whatever you do, I suggest that the first time you use any developer, just ask them to print out a couple of pictures first.
Over here, I have not had much luck with commercial developers.
I have all my files in PSD format (photoshop) and when I brought my disk to them for some 8x10 prints, I ended up with a whole bunch of purple whale shark pictures . They were using one of the Fuji machine and I did tell them not to do any color correction (which they said they did not). Costed me about $2 per picture but it would still be cheaper than doing it myself with my printer, wish I had better result!
Land pictures are usually fine but with underwater pictures, the color spectrum is very different so I think it may be a little tricky for some developers to do the job right.

 

[d56nut]

Thanks for all the replies!!! Do you need some kind of membership to have them done at Costco? We have both a Sam's Club and a Costco here. I have a membership at Sam's so I haven't really checked out Costco for anything.

Thanks again to everyone for all the ideas!!!

Michelle

 

[Finesse]

ssra30 once bubbled...
Whatever you do, I suggest that the first time you use any developer, just ask them to print out a couple of pictures first.

Good point!!

ssra30 once bubbled...
Over here, I have not had much luck with commercial developers.
I have all my files in PSD format (photoshop) and when I brought my disk to them for some 8x10 prints, I ended up with a whole bunch of purple whale shark pictures . They were using one of the Fuji machine and I did tell them not to do any color correction

Mine came out true to life .... (exactly as they looked on the computer screen) but were jpeg....

The biggest problem they had was the resolution (cropping) as the pictures were taken in 2560x1920 vs 2560x1696 {3:2} which left a slight boarder on one edge..... But they redid the blow ups (11x14) until THEY were happy with the result ....Was really surprised with the service

Whats wrong with purple whale sharks??? .....Hmmmm..... Barney the whale shark :wacko:



Michelle.....yes you do need the membership but well worth it !!!! ....and FYI the pictures were a mixture from a 3 mp camera and a 5 mp camera shot in HQ and SHQ mode

 

[ssra30]

Finesse once bubbled...



The biggest problem they had was the resolution (cropping) as the pictures were taken in 2560x1920 vs 2560x1696 {3:2} which left a slight boarder on one edge..... But they redid the blow ups (11x14) until THEY were happy with the result ....Was really surprised with the service

I wished mine were as helpful. They saw the purple whale shark and just said oh well, it never came out exactly the same as what I see on the computer!



I suppose since I never dragged the whaleshark out of the water to really see what its color truely is, may be purple is actually the real color!

 

[Finesse]

That's to bad ..... Have you printed them at home with any success??? Those are images that need to be on the wall !!!! Don't give up !!!!