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Who needs an expensive 24-bit colour scanner when you can pay Boots to put high-quality images on to a PhotoCD?

A relatively new development in CD-ROM technology is Kodak's PhotoCD format which allows you to transfer photographs on to a CD. Once you've got a disc filled with images, you can then use a PhotoCD reading program such as BlitterSoft's PhotoWorx to extract the pictures from the CD as bitmapped images. And because the images have been professionally scanned by Kodak, the image quality is excellent.

Most shops that offer photo development now also provide a PhotoCD transfer service - usually this costs about £5 for a blank CD with each image costing around 40p to transfer on to the CD (although this price fluctuates according to the complexity of your requirements). Each PhotoCD disc can hold a maximum of 100 PhotoCD images. OK, so you might not want to transfer 100 photos in one go but the bods at Kodak have managed to solve this problem too.

By using multisession discs, any additional photos can be transferred on to an existing PhotoCD disc fairly easily. If you want to be able to read a multisession PhotoCD disc, however, you must make sure that your CD-ROM drive is XA (multisession) compatible. Commodore's A570 CD-ROM drive for the A500 isn't PhotoCD compatible, for example, but the CD32 and the entire range of A1200 CD-ROM drives can read multisession PhotoCD discs.