New technology is but a click away

An Irvine photo shop is the first Kodak retailer in the country to offer a new, high-speed commercial print scanner that archives old prints onto photo CDs.

While you wait.

“Nearly every family has shoeboxes full of photos,” says Mitch Goldstone, president of 30 Minute Photos Etc. “We are talking billions, and hundreds of billions, of photos.”

Customers can have their photos, virtually any size, scanned onto a CD, uploaded onto a website to share a link with relatives and friends, as well as order prints, all within a few minutes.

Goldstone believes this is the natural evolution from film photography which created those shoeboxes of prints with no practical, quick way to get them scanned to digital photography, which typically stores photos on a CD for easy storage and quick access to possible order decisions.

Goldstone, a longtime Kodak customer and adviser, says the technology should be a boon for the company. He also believes this is a solution for archiving prized photos that could be lost in a natural disaster.

The scanner is capable of 150 pictures per minute.

“The convenience factor,” says Goldstone, “is overwhelming because any size photo - from tiny wallet pictures on onion-skin thin paper to 11x17-inch cardboard-thick enlargements are all scanned together, instantly.”

According to the Photo Marketing Association, Americans will order some 26 billion prints this year. Goldstone expects the scanners to be used by a wide array of businesses and agencies, such as attorneys and law enforcement that need to efficiently archive file photos.