Digital Photos

Why Do They Call It Digital Photo Development?

Since digital photos never actually exist on film, there's really no such thing as digital photo "development", but that's sort of the nickname everyone uses when we talk about taking our camera down to the local department store photo kiosk and asking them to give us some eight by ten glossies. Technically, they're not "developing" anything, but saying "would you develop these?" is a lot easier than saying "would you please copy these onto your computer, resize them in photoshop, print them onto glossy paper, and then hand them back to me?" Kind of like how we call movies "films", even when we're watching them on DVD.

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That said, one of the neat things about digital photography development is that you can do it right at home. If you wanted to develop your own film with a traditional camera, you'd need a darkroom, and darkrooms are incredibly expensive to set up and maintain. If you want to develop digital photos, all you need is a computer and a printer.

But here's the catch: You need a pretty good printer if you want to print out any decent digital photos. If you don't want to spend a couple hundred on a nice printer, printing at home is likely to create muddy, grainy images, on plain, non-glossy paper, with a low range of color and a blurry image quality. Of course, you might already have a pretty good printer. The only way to know is to print a photo out and see how it looks. Get some glossy paper and see if you can print out anything besides an ugly smear of black and rainbow ink. If it looks good, forget the print shop.

If it doesn't, don't run to the computer store and buy the most expensive printer you can find just yet. Ask yourself if you really need to develop your photos at home. It kind of boils down to how many photos you plan on developing on a regular basis. If you're a regular shutterbug who never goes anywhere without a camera, a two hundred dollar printer that can handle 24 million colors, high definition, and glossy paper may well pay for itself in a month's time. On the other hand, if you just need to print out a couple dozen photos from your vacation to Hawaii, save yourself some money and hit up the print shop or consider online photo printing.

For anyone with a serious passion for photography, getting your own high quality printer is definitely a good idea. Even if it seems like a big purchase now, it's worth it in the long run. It's like solar power. It's a lot of money up front, but from that point on, you never have to pay for electricity ever again. With a decent printer, you only have to pay for digital photo developing when you need to say, print out hundreds of copies, and would rather not put your printer through the ringer.

...Unless you want a poster or something, that is. In which case, paying the ten or twenty bucks for a one time printing is a lot cheaper than going and buying a several thousand dollar piece of equipment that you'll probably only use a dozen times.