Photo CD made a lot of sense for small-time pre-press desktop publishing. The images were well scanned at high resolution at a time when desktop scanners were finicky SCSI devices that took a long time for a mediocre scan. If you were not developing your film yourself, you could do worse than to just have the lab scan the negatives for you, and indeed this is how I use my film camera for the most part, enlarging only the images I like.

At the time, usable digital cameras looked like the Kodak F3 back plus shoulder-mounted hard drive in this article: https://www.businessinsider.com/digital-photography-revoluti...