Wednesday, January 30, 2008 11:26 PM
Over the past few years, photos have become more and more important to me. I keep upgrading cameras trying to find the best option, and trying out different catalog software to find the best fit. So far -- nothing is perfect! [As an aside: I have an idea for photo management software that would be a huge departure from what's out there, but no time to implement it. The story of my life. :-( ]
Anyway, one thorn in my side is the huge number of pre-digital pictures that I have. I learned that Wal-Mart will scan negatives very cheaply (about the same price as printing). This doesn't seem to be an advertised service around here, but they scan them and burn the images to CD. The problem is the resolution isn't that high and they don't do any negative cleanup/image cleanup. That and it's Wal-Mart. But I digress...
After a good amount of searching, I came across ScanCafe. They scan negatives at 3000 DPI for only .19/picture. Of course remember that a negative is only about an inch, but it's still around 3x greater than my Wal-Mart scans. Even better, they remove dust and scratches with Kodak Digital ICE, color correct, and adjust exposure as needed all in the same price! Their secret is that they ship your negatives/photos to Bangalore where technicians scan and touch them up.
I shipped off around 500 negatives (nice for a "trial" huh?!) toward the beginning of December. Then I waited. And waited. As it turned out, Christmas time was not the time to do this! At least that was the reason that they gave for the delay when I called them.
Finally they appeared on the site. Here's the interesting thing. You pay for half of the negatives up-front. They give you a pre-paid label and wait. When they finish scanning, they put them up on their web site so you can browse them. Then you can delete the ones that you want to delete, categorize into albums (which you can also do by dropping the negatives into labeled physical envelopes too!), or just take a look at the results. It's really wonderful. The site is a little bit slow and I had to refresh a few times, but it worked pretty well. It could have handled some nice DHTML to freshen up the UI a bit and make it more responsive.
When you are done going through them, you checkout. If you selected more than half you pay the rest. You can't go below half -- at least you won't get any money refunded. Considering how they treat your pictures, I don't blame them for this!
That was a few days ago. I expect my DVD of scans to arrive along with the original negatives within a week or two. I'm very excited and have been extremely impressed by the scanning results in the lower resolution preview. Unfortunately you can't download the full versions even after you check-out.
I'll put up an update when I receive the return shipment. Assuming nothing gets damaged in the final stages, I'm rating them very high. Great product, great experience, great results!
Fortunately I'm not shooting non-digital anymore (nor for a few years no), so it won't be long and I'll be through all of these!