I was so wowed by the quality of the digital prints we picked up at Wal-Mart last night that I wanted to do a little research on what equipment they use to develop the prints.

They use a Fulifilm Frontier 370 Digital Mini Lab. They use this to develop both digital images and images from traditional film cameras. When they are developing film, the negative is scanned into the system digitally. From that point on the process is the same for both types of pictures.

The image is then projected onto traditional photographic paper and wet developed with traditional chemicals like it has been for decades. Pretty clever.

If you are interested in a little more detail this is a link to nice nine-page .pdf brochure.