If you shoot slides or prints, you can use a scanner to capture the image digitally. This gives a very high quality digital image for the money. In most price bands you can actually buy a scanner and point-and-shoot film camera that will give a higher resolution and a sharper picture than any digital camera available today. Scanners come in two types: flatbed (good for prints, and for film if it has a transparency hood) and film scanners (good for both slides and negatives - don't be misled by wrong information that says these are for slides only).

Digital cameras are convenient, fast and fun. Digital cameras let you take a picture, look at it immediately to see that it is okay (on a built-in monitor) and then download it to your computer. Two-megapixel cameras give images that can look nearly identical to a standard photo print at 4x6 and even 5x7 inches in size. Once you have the camera and memory cards, there are no film processing costs.

Photo disks and Photo CD and Picture Disks. These are storage devices made from scans of your film image done at a photo lab. They are inexpensive ways of getting high-resolution images into a computer as almost every computer has a CD-ROM drive that will read them. Plus, you don't need to buy any new equipment. They are, however, only as good as the person doing the scans, so you may see a difference in results from lab to lab.

serial cable from the camera to the computer with a serial cable. This is fairly easy to do, but very slow.

Use a camera with a floppy disk. Very convenient because most computers have a floppy drive (though newer laptops do not) , but extremely limiting because of resolution. These cameras will not give you top quality digital images - the resolution is too low. They can't go higher, because the images then won't fit on a floppy.

Download the images through a USB port. If your camera can use the USB connection, this is an extremely easy and convenient way to download images.