Digital cameras are less wasteful because you select the photos before you get them printed.
Digital cameras are getting better resolution all the time, and some volunteers have experimented with making a kind of home-made planetary scanner from a digital camera and a stand.
So far, the results don't quite match a dedicated scanner, but as digital cameras improve, this may become a common option.
They are really not scanners at all, but a very high-end digital camera on a stand.
Whatever the current problems, the prospect of using digital cameras is exciting, because it will mean that non-typists will be able to produce old books borrowed from libraries without worrying about scan quality vs. damage to the spine.
Consider, for example, a user who is trying to determine which digital camera to buy.
The cell images were recorded with a digital camera and processed to generate high-resolution images.