If you haven’t come across the Vector Magic website before, and you’re interested in creating vector graphics, then go and visit it now! You can upload your rasterised images to the site and they will be converted to a good quality vector. It’s particularly useful if you have a logo in jpg or gif format and you need to get it into a vector form. It saves you quite a bit of time over trying to reproduce the same thing in Illustrator.
In the example below you can see a scanned image of a monkey (yes that’s supposed to be a monkey!) I drew on a piece of paper. On the right hand side is the vector created on the vector magic website.
When you upload your image you’ll find there are several settings you can choose from to get the best quality vector. There are various price plans available for using the service and there is also a desktop version available. If you find you’re converting a lot of bitmaps to vector, I think it would be worth paying for this service.