Digital Pictures
Having finally gotten our acts together, Tzippora & I went through the nearly 500 pictures from our trip to Spain, and picked around half to have printed. The great thing about digicams is you can take as many pictures as you want, for virtually no cost (other than battery usage and initial purchase of digital film). However, this leads to a problem - lots and lots of pictures. Now that the pictures are chosen, it was a matter of finding a place to have the prints made. Target does them for $.25, and some drug stores have sales for around $.20. BonusPrint is the best deal that I've found online $.18 per print, plus a flat shipping charge of $1.99. The total for the prints we're having made is just shy of $50, which seems expensive.
However, if you compare this to traditional film/developing costs, you'd find that the film alone would be ~$25, plus printing costs of ~$75, for a total of ~$100. And that's assuming that one only shot 250 pictures (not the 500 we shot, of which we could select the ones we wanted to print). Traditionalists might argue that with standard developing, double prints are often free (but for digital prints, doubles cost twice as much), but IMHO most doubles get stuck in a box. For the few that you need multiples of (often more than just one extra), it's easier and cheaper overall.
Final verdict: digital is definitely cheaper in the long run. I'll report back later on the quality of the prints. The one drawback I didn't mention is the 2 weeks turnaround time that BonusPrints requires. The advantage is their full money back guarantee (including shipping!).
Anyone have any better/cheaper printing thoughts?