HP Digital Photography

Making photos digital
Take a look at how you store old snapshots. Do you keep heirloom photos in a musty corner of the basement? Your photos, especially those developed prior to the 1980s, can be damaged from something as seemingly harmless as the humidity in the air.

Preserving photos digitally has considerable advantages. You can:

• Edit and crop to fix flaws, or create special effects like sepia tones (for an antique look).
• Create slideshows and set your photos to music.
• Keep copies in a secure place.
• Share your pictures easily—instead of making costly reprints, you can send a digital photo to as many people as you like.

It’s easier than ever to convert your images into digital files, whether they’re photos, slides, or negatives. Flatbed scanners from HP feature handy one-touch scanning. For slides or negatives, you'll need a scanner specifically built for that purpose, like the HP Scanjet 4890 scanner. Some scanners also have optional slide and negative adapters that you can add on.

Portable storage options
Once you’ve converted your photos to digital format, consider storing them on a DVD or CD. They’re cheaper and easier to mail than printed photos, and less likely to get damaged. And consider this: The lifespan of a disc ranges from 10 to 100 years, depending on storage conditions and media quality.

DVD technology has many advantages over other portable, shareable digital storage options. A DVD holds 4.7GB of data, which translates to more than 15,000 high-quality pictures. That’s about seven times the capacity of a CD. And HP’s innovative double-layer recording technology lets you use double-layer DVDs to record almost twice as much data as you can on single-layer DVDs. Compare CDs and DVDs to see what’s right for you.

Flexible DVD media
You can record photos to DVD+R (“recordable”) discs, which record data only once, or record them to DVD+RW (“rewritable”) discs, which you can write or record over about 1,000 times. DVD+R discs are cheaper, but you may want to spend a little more on DVD+RW discs for the added flexibility.

DVD writers are fast, too. The HP DVD Writer 640i writes discs at 2.4x double layer (both sides without turning over). Assuming you have 15,000 photos stored on your hard drive, it would take less than 25 minutes to completely fill a DVD. That’s 600 photos a minute …10 photos a second!

DVD+R with photos on them can be played on most DVD players, including computer DVD drives and TV DVD video players.

Software options
Discover how software such as HP Image Zone can let you remove red-eye, adjust color and lighting, and fix brightness and contrast in your digital photos. It’s included with many HP imaging products. You can also download a free copy of HP Photosmart Essential. This easy-to-use software also lets you edit, print, and share images. Plus, it has a plug-in that makes it simple to automatically create CDs and DVDs of your photos.

Consider using ArcSoft Showbiz editing software (included with most HP PCs and DVD writers) to produce your photo scrapbook as a movie. Or you can use HP Image Zone and Windows XP Media Center Edition to create a slideshow with music.

Once you’ve got your photos and movie masterpieces archived on a DVD, give the disc a professional-quality label. Most HP PCs feature LightScribe technology, which lets you burn personalized, laser-etched labels directly onto the disc.

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