Scanning slides, negatives, prints etc

Ham1 · October 27, 2006

Hi everyone,

There is a company called ScanCafe (www.scancafe.com) who is going to start putting their customers digital files on to SmugMug.

If you are current SM subscriber they will upload all the photos into your galleries, if you are not a subscriber we are going to offer their customers a discount to sign up. ScanCafe will ONLY charge you for the photos you want to keep. :thumb (Has to be a min of 50% of the slides etc you send in)

I am interested to know if anyone has used them? I also have authorization to give a 20% discount to anyone that wants to try them out and report back to me. The coupon code is: SMUG20

Thanks,
Markham

Baldy · October 28, 2006

I am definitely going to try them. I get asked about this all the time.

Andy · October 28, 2006

My honey just tonight asked me to go get a new scanner, she wants to have about 20 albums worth of photos scanned - I say, "SAY NO" to the home scanner and I'm sending all that off to ScanCafe

w00t

ajgauthier · October 28, 2006

I'll try it and review
I just checked out their services, sounds pretty good at 19c per negative image!

I'm just concerned about shipping away all my negatives, but I may bite the bullet and do it since I bought a negative scanner 2 years ago and STILL haven't scanned any of my photos! Way too time consuming...

great find, glad there is a relationship with smugmug!

Adrienne

Nat_RH · October 29, 2006

I just signed up but didn't see a place for the coupon code.

Am I getting ahead of myself? Does that come once the scan's are pushed to smugmug?

Thanks for the info.

colourbox · October 29, 2006

ajgauthier wrote:

I'm just concerned about shipping away all my negatives

I would be too. None other than Graham Nash (CSN singer and co-founder of Nash Editions fine art photo printing) permanently lost an entire box of irreplaceable negatives of shots he took of his famous 60s rock star friends (David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, et al) during shipping. Despite his fame and resources the negatives were never found.

If I were sending away for scans I would send it in stages instead of waving bye-bye to everything at once.

claudermilk · October 30, 2006

Hmm, 35mm or prints only. Oh well. Once I'm set up to deal with my 120 film, I'll automatically be able to handle 35mm.

Ham1 · October 30, 2006

when to give the Coupon.

Nat_RH wrote:

I just signed up but didn't see a place for the coupon code.

Am I getting ahead of myself? Does that come once the scan's are pushed to smugmug?

Thanks for the info.

Stand by, I will get the answer on this question today.

Markham

Ham1 · October 30, 2006

claudermilk wrote:

Hmm, 35mm or prints only. Oh well. Once I'm set up to deal with my 120 film, I'll automatically be able to handle 35mm.

They do 35mm, slides, prints and albums: http://scancafe.com/pricing.php

Markham

Ham1 · October 30, 2006

Nat_RH wrote:

I just signed up but didn't see a place for the coupon code.

Am I getting ahead of myself? Does that come once the scan's are pushed to smugmug?

Thanks for the info.

Here is the answer I got back from ScanCafe regarding your question:

customers are asked for a coupon a the very end of the process once they have reviewed the pictures and made their selection. We call that the [final checkout / payment]. Customers are charged for their scans only at the very end of the process. When a customer places an order, he only pays for the shipping of his box from his place to us. He pays us because we generate the label for him and pay UPS on his behalf. This ensures that shipping information is correct and that we have his detailed information. We don't make customers pre-pay for the scan like most other services.
Feel free to get back to us if you have any questions.

Sounds pretty fair to me.

Markham

Nat_RH · November 4, 2006

Thanks for the information. Looks like an excellent service.

Now to decide which to send...

Take Care!

photoman06 · November 10, 2006

ScanCafe ships your photos off to India to be scanned
I spoke to them on the phone. ScanCafe informed me they ship their customers photos off to somewhere in India to be scanned. That's why the price is so cheap. I called a few other places and most do the scanning in the USA but BritePix also sends the photos overseas to be scanned. You know the old adage, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is...

Try doing a search on google for photo scanning service http://www.google.com/search?q=photo+scanning+service
There are others companies that can do this work without the risk of shipping your photos to India

claudermilk · November 10, 2006

photoman06 wrote:

I spoke to them on the phone. ScanCafe informed me they ship their customers photos off to somewhere in India to be scanned. That's why the price is so cheap. I called a few other places and most do the scanning in the USA but BritePix also sends the photos overseas to be scanned. You know the old adage, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is...

Try doing a search on google for photo scanning service http://www.google.com/search?q=photo+scanning+service
There are others companies that can do this work without the risk of shipping your photos to India

:wow:eek1 ummm....no thanks.

Scott Buel · December 11, 2006

Andy wrote:

My honey just tonight asked me to go get a new scanner, she wants to have about 20 albums worth of photos scanned - I say, "SAY NO" to the home scanner and I'm sending all that off to ScanCafe

w00t

Hey Andy- did you ever send them off to ScanCafe? Can you report your experience with the process, reults, and any customer service issues?

It would be most appreciated, as I'm shopping around for this service right now.

03FatBoy · December 14, 2006

I would also be very interested to hear some reviews from the users here.

Anyone used them yet?

anwmn1 · December 14, 2006

Any one do this yet?
I just talked with my dad last night and inherited a project that applies here. My late grandfather was a photog of sorts, while my dad was rummaging though his parents house he came across BOXES of slides. He said he bought the largest plastic bin he could find and it still wouldn't all fit.

I have been researching different scanners- flat, drum, wet, accessories, photoshop add ins, etc. etc. It is a small fortune just to get yourself set up and I sure do not have the time to scan 2 to 4k of slides. This seems like a good deal but a little risky at the same time.

So anxiously waiting to hear from anyone that has used scancafe or another service with similar pricing.

ANDY- where you at on this??

Soon to be swimming in slides

Aaron

03FatBoy · December 14, 2006

I've decided to grab some of my older photos and send them off this weekend. Sounds like the turn around time is about a month.

I'll report back when I get them back and post for all see.

jaakkoh · December 19, 2006

APS supported, too / RE: Shipping to India
I'm just filling the forms for my first order to ScanCafe. I was positively surprised to find out that they also seem to support APS scanning as the order form page http://scancafe.com/quantity.php says "35mm negatives (strip, APS cartrige)". And APS is the same price as 35mm.

photoman06 wrote:

... they ship their customers photos off to somewhere in India to be scanned.

If somebody's concerned about the shipping to India the second best choice for my purposes would've been http://stores.ebay.com/Film-Scanning-USA , which charges 25 cents / frame.

ScanCafe's system seems to be very well built (even though I'll only know after the scanning is completed and I've gotten back my 'originals').

The thing with shipping to India is (in my opinion) that it really doesn't matter. If it was some underdeveloped African country I'd be hesitant, but India can really be just as good - or bad - as shipping to US. It simply depends on how the system - American or Indian-American - has been built.

Just to make sure I don't loose anything valuable testing here I'm shipping (in the first load I'm sending in) only photos that I have already scanned (with no-so-good quality) or negatives of less important photos that I have paper copies of, though.

I'll post on my experience 'after the fat lady has sung'.

padu · December 21, 2006

After a month that I shipped my wedding negatives to scancafe, only now they've completed my order.

Things I didn't like: as soon as they received my order, they've updated the status to "processing", and after 3 weeks, they didn't say a word about what was happening. I called them and a lady answered me from a cell phone, she said that I didn't have to worry about it and apologized for the delay.
The selection process is not intuitive, for example, the medium and big thumbnails are exactly the same size... the whole web interface is not user friendly. I ended up ordering everything just to save time.

I'm supposed to receive my DVD with hi-res pictures tomorrow. I'll post one of them here so you can check the quality.

03FatBoy · December 21, 2006

padu wrote:

After a month that I shipped my wedding negatives to scancafe, only now they've completed my order.

Things I didn't like: as soon as they received my order, they've updated the status to "processing", and after 3 weeks, they didn't say a word about what was happening. I called them and a lady answered me from a cell phone, she said that I didn't have to worry about it and apologized for the delay.
The selection process is not intuitive, for example, the medium and big thumbnails are exactly the same size... the whole web interface is not user friendly. I ended up ordering everything just to save time.

I'm supposed to receive my DVD with hi-res pictures tomorrow. I'll post one of them here so you can check the quality.

Well that's not a good start.

I shipped our Hawaii and Tahiti vacation negs off on Monday.

Fingers are still crossed.

03FatBoy · December 22, 2006

order update
UPS picked up my order on Monday. UPS delivered today. Got email today from Scancafe.com:

We have received your package with your originals.

Our qualified technicians will now schedule your pictures for scanning. Once all your originals are scanned and manually processed, we will upload them to your ScanCafe account. At that point, we will send you a notification email with a link which will take you to the convenient online review page, so that you can make your selection.

So far so good. Quick response (automated) from them.

gus · December 22, 2006

claudermilk wrote:

:wow:eek1 ummm....no thanks.

2nd that..my grandfather was an amature photographer & his stuff goes back to his time in WW1 ..pyramids & all.

Unreplaceable isnt the word.

jojo123 · January 12, 2007

So far so good
I placed an order a while back. Their FAQ has some good reasoning in that if the negatives are gone a month, it's not like you're in a rush as they've probably been collecting dust for a while [I just developed one roll that had been sitting in the fridge forever... digital cameras!]. Nevertheless, I was of the same mind as others here: do it in batches, just in case.

I sent in about 500 negatives... totally unknown, I just picked strips with the most photos, put them all in a ziploc bag and sent them off. I think they go to San Diego first, so the response time on that leg is standard-quickish. The India leg took another two weeks or so before I received an email containing a link to thumbnails of all the photos.

I liked the inclusion of Digi Ice as well the super-low cost. Anyhow, unlike another poster here, I found the organization and presentation of the thumbnails acceptable. The photos were in about 15 albums of varying quantity. Each photo was about 100-ish KB. You could browse by thumbnails of three sizes or click through each photo. I only discarded about 10% of the 508 submitted. With return shipping it came out to $92. A nice touch was their creation of a "Bad" album with all the photos that were either too dark or had other problems. I wasn't paying attention, but there was also a zoom function. Any photos you 'discard' are put in a discard album for viewing later. Though I think once you place the order, you lose out on the ability to view the photos.

The negatives are scanned at 3000dpi and they put 300 images on a DVD. 300 jpgs in roughly four and a half gigs seems like each is large/quality/3000dpi-may-as-well-be-chinese-to-me. No final verdict yet, though. I still have to receive my dvds and negs back. Sure beats the heck out of scanning these myself... hopefully....

Scott Buel · January 12, 2007

jojo123 wrote:

I sent in about 500 negatives....

Thanks for the update and review of their services. I myself plan on using them afterall and have had several very pleasant conversations with them. They are totally willing to accomodate my "special" requests and needs and have been especially helpful with trying to get just what it is I actually do need straightened out.

Let us know how the rest of your experience works out as soon as you know.

'preesh.

CatOne · January 12, 2007

Why has everyone here "supposed to get them back soon" but nobody has reported back yet that they have?

Awfully long thread for no results :-/

dogwood · January 12, 2007

CatOne wrote:

Why has everyone here "supposed to get them back soon" but nobody has reported back yet that they have?

Awfully long thread for no results :-/

Anyone gotten a DVD back yet?

jojo123 · January 13, 2007

dogwood wrote:

Anyone gotten a DVD back yet?

You did read this is a long process, right? Patience is a virtue. :jose

RebelXT · January 13, 2007

Got my DVDs!

jojo123 wrote:

You did read this is a long process, right? Patience is a virtue. :jose

I got my Scancafe DVDs from my 1st order yesterday (300 slides from the 1970s). Scan quality was great...also the brown hue reduction that they were able to achieve on the old slides was helpful. Turn around time was 4+ weeks. They could improve on their turn around time...for me it was recovering images from the 70s..I wasn't in rush though.

Overall I liked the order process and the results on DVD. I didn't use the upload to photosharing website though. I'll be sending them negatives next.

Wolfgang

wellman · January 15, 2007

FYI - SmugMug might want to give them a graphic for their homepage, or ask them to lay it out properly. It's all squished and unpolished.

VA_Taper · January 22, 2007

There is a problem with cropping on a number of my print scans. I'm hoping to hear back from scancafe, I've sent two "emails" to them so far. The quality of the majority of the scans is wonderful, but I'm not sure why some were cropped so odd? Hopefully they be corrected on the order and not have to be resent.

I sent a suggestion for improvement that the scans should indicate if they are from prints or negatives so you can eliminate the lower quality scan when you have duplicates. They should also allow album creation and sorting from their review page. All in all I think I'm going to be VERY happy when all is said and done judging from the previews, I sent in over 1600 negatives and about 600 prints.

-Chris

VA_Taper · January 24, 2007

Just an update:

Recieved a phone call today from Scancafe. They not only took the time to come up with a solution to the problem, but also answered all my questions regarding their user interface, uploading, etc.

The "personal touch" of receiving a phone call from an internet based company (instead of a canned email) impresses me.

Looking forward to recieving my DVDs. If anyone is considering ScanCafe I'd say go for it, very good company.

-Chris

Scanning slides, negatives, prints etc

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