After a few months of planning and organizing I finally sent off around 1500 slides and negatives to be digitally scanned. I feel relieved, but anxious at the same time to see the final digital images which will eventually be added to my stock gallery. These images are mostly from my travels to Latin America, the Philippines and Malaysia.
During the past few months I have been trying to locate all of my old slides and negatives from friends and relatives houses around the country. I have also been looking into purchasing a new Nikon ICE scanner to turn these slides into a digital format. After a lot of research and reading on-line reviews, etc. I decided to use a scanning service called ScanCafe, which is based out of California. I don’t remember how I came across this company, but I think I must have found them while reading a review or in Google. The moment I saw their professional looking website, I bookmarked it and have been reviewing their services and company for over a month now. I must say to this point I am very impressed with my interactions and use of their service. Not only do they have the most affordable prices in the industry, but they are very professional and customer service oriented. Their website is top of the line and shows you exactly what stage of the scanning process they are in for your order. Although, I have just today sent my slides to them, I can tell the next eight weeks will be worry free.
How Scan Cafe works: Basically, you send them your slides and negatives and eight weeks later they send you a dvd with all of your images. Besides having great prices, the best thing I found was you don’t have to keep or pay for all of the images you send them. You only need to purchase a minimum of 50% of the actual amount you send in. This is a great advantage…you don’t have to sort all of your negatives and slides before hand. Just send everything in and select the ones you want later. They make all of your images available on-line for viewing and selecting. I’ve included a chart below to show the entire process.
The standard price for a 3000dpi slide scan is $.24 and $.19 for a negative. I opted for the professional scan which is $.09 more per scan and adds another 1000dpi to the resolution (4000dpi). These are the best prices that I was able to find on-line, by a long way. You may be wondering why they can have such low prices? Well, it’s outsourcing. They send all of your originals to Bangalore, India to be scanned. When I called their office in California, the women said they send everything over by Fedex in a large bundle, so nothing gets lost. They have 24hour security at the facility there with over 400 workstations. It seems like a good operation they have going and I’m not worried at all about losing my slides or having them be so far away. I’ve sent many international packages via Fedex and have never had a problem. You can see some more information about their Bangalore facility here.
Like I said, I’m still at the beginning of this process, but I look forward to seeing the final digital images and I’m excited to have found such a great service. Be sure to check back in a few months to see some of these images in my stock gallery. (Below: A box full of my slides and negatives getting ready to be shipped.)