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I suggest you check out this site: http://www.westcoastimaging.com/

Unfortunately, the owner and most of the staff are radical Christians with a massive persecution complex. Where they once hired good photographers to work for them, they now recruit from their local church - and the owner has threatened former clients and employees, in addition to "cost cutting techniques" like dumping used fixer into the town sewer system. He is not a nice person.

The same information and expertise is out there at other businesses. I suggest you patronize them, rather than WCI.

I suggest you check out this site: http://www.westcoastimaging.com/

These guys seem to know their stuff, work with top-quality equipment, and provide a lot of information relevant to producing high-quality prints.

Take it easy.

If you really cared about the pictures, you'd buy a drum scanner or send them off to a company like West Coast Imaging or Nancy Scans that will give you the highest possible scan quality. If you want "good enough" quality, get an Epson 4490 or 4990. The 4490 can scan legal-sized reflective media and 6x12cm medium format, two strips of 6 frames of 35mm, or four mounted slides. I'd recommend SilverFast Ai Studio for bulk scanning.

If you want it done right, have it done by professionals.

Calypso Imagingin Santa Clara does what you want, as does West Coast Imaging in Oakhurst.

Both are studios that employ long-time professional photographers who apply their knowledge of photography and digital printing to make the best prints possible from your photographs. Calypso also offers workshops taught by people like Bill Atkinson and Charlie Cramer, in case you want to edit your own images and simply output them on printers like the LIghtjet, Chromira, or lage format Epson 76/9600 or K3 printers.

Take a look at the client lists of each company - they are the top tier for this kind of work and it shows. Frankly, most working photographers hardly have time to print their own work, and the best photographers simply don't have time to fool with images once they're made in camera.

The biggest mistakes most photographers make when trying to become professionals is the failure to let someone else take responsibility for printing those images (while you stay in the feedback loop, of course) and the refusal of "tight" artists to belly up and pay for that service.

In other words, If you have a day job to pay for your photography habit, and provided you have the requisite talent to succeed at your chosen niche of photography, it will be nearly impossible to become a full-time professional photographer until and unless you hire an employee to do all the work you don't have time for, or hire a company to print your images for you. (No picture makes a straight print.) Otherwise, you will spend your whole life in a darkroom or behind a monitor instead of making new images - which is the lifeblood of a photographer.

How do I know all this? I am a large format photographer who prints digitally. And I have worked with all the companies linked above, either as an employee or consultant. Most photographers never have enough time to actually, you know, photograph and have a life and make prints and do the billing - you have to give up a couple of those things to be able to do the others successfully. And most photographers can't even manage that!

digital images printed professionally at photo labs VERY cheap

Profesionally and very cheap is somewhat mutually exclusive. Yes, you can get printed on photographic paper cheap, such as at Walmart or Costco, but they aren't really "professional". Chances are, the person behind the counter isn't going to know or care squat about color balance, so it's a crapshoot to get it looking right.

If you're just printing snapshots of last week's party, it's a good deal though. If you have a masterpiece, then look at Dry Creek Photo for taking a stab at getting good quality out of places like Costco. Some people have good results with Costco, but depends upon the particular establishment and quality of personnel.

Then, there are professional printers, but I wouldn't classify them as "cheap"

Another overlooked aspect for home photo printers is versatility. For example, we print greeting cards from our printer instead of dragging ourselves to a Hallmarks and wasting gas.

I use my Epson 2200 for printing on canvas and other fine art papers. This is something you'll pay big wads of money for outside anyways, and you have complete control over the results.

Film (given enough square inches) has a capacity that exceeds any commercially available digital sensor. for instance, our Heidelberg Tango scanner has a true scanning resolution of 10,780dpi. The photomultiplier tubes in the scanner (one each of red, geen, and blue) are looking at liquid-mounted film through optically clear mylar sheets from fractions of an inch away through a microscope lens. There's a picture of the scanner and some other info on our web site.

Combined with a scanner, gigapixels of resolution are easily available without upsampling, up-resing, or other resolution-creating tricks.

My 4X5 view camera with fine-grained slide film captures about 1.4GP usable resolution at 8bits per channel in a fraction of a second. Go to an 8X10 camera and film at that scanning resolution (5000dpi) and you quadruple the number of pixels - although Photoshop can't open the resulting file because it's too big.

Compared to digital composition, shooting on film and drum scanning is faster and cheaper if your time is valued as a professional. I don't expect that this situation will last forever, but this "gigapixel barrier" article ignores some very relevant options when there is plenty of time to make a photograph and quality is paramount.

Film (given enough square inches) has a capacity that exceeds any commercially available digital sensor. for instance, our Heidelberg Tango scanner has a true scanning resolution of 10,780dpi. The photomultiplier tubes in the scanner (one each of red, geen, and blue) are looking at liquid-mounted film through optically clear mylar sheets from fractions of an inch away through a microscope lens. There's a picture of the scanner and some other info on our web site.

Combined with a scanner, gigapixels of resolution are easily available without upsampling, up-resing, or other resolution-creating tricks.

My 4X5 view camera with fine-grained slide film captures about 1.4GP usable resolution at 8bits per channel in a fraction of a second. Go to an 8X10 camera and film at that scanning resolution (5000dpi) and you quadruple the number of pixels - although Photoshop can't open the resulting file because it's too big.

Compared to digital composition, shooting on film and drum scanning is faster and cheaper if your time is valued as a professional. I don't expect that this situation will last forever, but this "gigapixel barrier" article ignores some very relevant options when there is plenty of time to make a photograph and quality is paramount.

The minilab system that is widely regarded as the best is the Fuji Frontier system. How does it work? By scanning film. Of course, it accepts files from digital cameras as well.

What is the best way to get large, "professional" prints? The Lightjet. How do these operate? Using very high quality scans! (See West Coast Imaging, for example). My point? You can already get digital images produced in the exact same manner as the best film prints.

There are already a lot of people who think digital photography has surpassed even medium format photography. See the Luminous Landscape, for example.

As for widespread adoption, photojournalists have all but abandoned film. The P&S crowd is already beginning to abandon film.