Jacob Maentz

ScanCafe Scanning Services for Slides & Negatives

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.

Slides to prepare ScanCafe
<—My wife preparing slides to be sent to ScanCafe.

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.

scan cafe logo
ScanCafe order status

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.)

box shipping to scancafe

Jacob Maentz Jun 28, 2008
Photography 27
Next Interview with Pedro Patrício of Photoburst.net

27 Comments

  7. I found your blog via Google while searching for photo scanner reviews price and your post regarding e Scanning Services for Slides & Negatives | News & Blog looks very interesting to me. I have a few websites of my own and I must say that your site is really top notch. Keep up the great work on a really high class resource.

  8. I found your blog via Google while searching for photo scanner reviews price and your post regarding e Scanning Services for Slides & Negatives | News & Blog looks very interesting to me. I have a few websites of my own and I must say that your site is really top notch. Keep up the great work on a really high class resource.

  9. Just a quick update on this post. I recently received my slides and digital files from ScanCafe. The whole process went very smooth and there were no problems along the way. I have only begun to look at the digital files, but from what I can tell the files look good. The cd with the files came back in a professional case and selecting them on-line was very useful and easy. I would still recommend this company to anyone thinking of getting their old slides/negatives scanned.

  10. Just a quick update on this post. I recently received my slides and digital files from ScanCafe. The whole process went very smooth and there were no problems along the way. I have only begun to look at the digital files, but from what I can tell the files look good. The cd with the files came back in a professional case and selecting them on-line was very useful and easy. I would still recommend this company to anyone thinking of getting their old slides/negatives scanned.

  13. The problem is that they don’t tell you up front that they are a) shipping your slides to India b) it will take two months or more to get your pictures. I’ll never use them again.

  14. The problem is that they don’t tell you up front that they are a) shipping your slides to India b) it will take two months or more to get your pictures. I’ll never use them again.

  15. I sent about 800 photos to ScanCafe after looking for a scanning service to use. All i can say is WOW!!! The quality is awesome. Well worth the money. There is no issue with the India scanning. I was more worried about UPS loosing my package.

    SCANCAFE Rocks and I continue to send orders

    Thanks,
    Judd

  16. I sent about 800 photos to ScanCafe after looking for a scanning service to use. All i can say is WOW!!! The quality is awesome. Well worth the money. There is no issue with the India scanning. I was more worried about UPS loosing my package.

    SCANCAFE Rocks and I continue to send orders

    Thanks,
    Judd

  17. Apparently the processing times are spiking upwards as they become more popular. Still, the quality of work was excellent.

  18. Apparently the processing times are spiking upwards as they become more popular. Still, the quality of work was excellent.

  20. This is a very goos idea for business. Though a film company ceased their production of films, there are still many films out and they should be converted into digital before it ruins.

  21. I am in the process of reviewing about 3300 scans. I am happy with the quality I see in the small, review versions of the scans. I was prepared for the time it took to get them so that was not a problem (about 4 weeks).

    THE PROBLEM: Even with a hig bandwidth, high speed computer, the review process is slow and tedious. I have communicated with them several times – they keep saying to use firefox (which I use) and that there might be a “temporary glitch” in their system.

    Unfortunately it seems this “temporary glitch' is occurring every day and at all times, since i have been working at this for about 10 dyas at all different times. I've tried several computers in different locations, all with brodband or T1 access.

    The scancafe pages are slow to respond, sometimes seem to hang o freeze entirely, you can't tell if something is going to happen or if the system has stopped responding, navigating back and forth between folders is slow, tedious, painful. Overall, the review process has been a bummer.

    I get the feeling the scancafe people WANT you to get frustrated, giveup “rejecting” scans, and just hit the “checkout now” button and buy all the scans. So beware – they say you can cut your costs by rejecting up to 1/2 the scans, but they (or their system) makes it tedious and time consuming to do so. Makes you go “hmmmmmm”. 😉

  23. However, I still also find their Web site very slow and I'm just trying to place my order! This is not reassuring. Are others still experiencing this as well or is it just me?

  25. However, I still also find their Web site very slow and I'm just trying to place my order! This is not reassuring. Are others still experiencing this as well or is it just me?

  27. However, I still also find their Web site very slow and I'm just trying to place my order! This is not reassuring. Are others still experiencing this as well or is it just me?