Comments on: Reviewing the results of a ScanCafe order

I recently received the results of a ScanCafe. Bottom line? Good quality and, at $0.24 per slide and $0.27 per print, the price is hard to beat.

[slidesinaflash]

I'm going to try to make this not spammy - so I'll start with a disclosure, I own Slides in a Flash, a small company that is using digital cameras to convert slides rather than scanning. Saying that, I've found that the niches we serve are people who are looking for output in RAW the format they are used to processing for their own digital photos, and people who can't wait 3 months. Slides are usually processed and posted online within 24 hours of receiving payment (or receiving slides if they were pre-paid) and mailed back as soon as the customer is satisfied. I'd love to offer the 'discard the ones you don't want' option, but I think I'd have to charge more to start with (I'm not in India!). I also feel like that would be stealing an idea. :)

What is amazing to me is the number of companies that can exist on a tiny scale (this business is not my main source of income) despite the giants like ScanCafe. The web is an amazing equalizer, and I think this is a good thing for keeping the quality customers receive at a higher level.

[ghaff]

re: small companies. I think the reason may be that there aren't particular economies of scale unless you're talking about an international operation like this one. As for the "discard the ones you don't want," it seems mostly a gimmick to me--at least for slides and prints. I'm going to have to sort through the stuff at some point anyway so why not do it before sending out to be scanned.

[zupcsics]

Re ScanCafe: What they don't tell you about scanning negatives is that they will NOT scan individual frames.

So if you want individual negatives scanned, they will scan the entire strip, you can delete up to half, but you'll still end up paying for a lot of scans that you don't want - and they will end up on your CD/DVD as well.

Too bad, because scanning the negative will (usually) give the best results (they scan negatives to much higher resolutions). Unfortunately, this limitation makes using ScanCafe to scan negatives much more expensive than it seems, and makes the results much less convenient than scanning prints or slides.