Photo scanning services?

Wrace wrote:
Thanks for the replies.

My ultimate goal here is to produce a thumb drive (or other media) that contains these images to give to immediate family members. In addition I will use the digital images and the internet to help understand my fathers history better.

I think it's reasonable to assume I will want/need to improve the quality of some of the important images. (or have somebody do that for me) It's also reasonable to assume that these images will be used for everything from digital photo frames, to prints, maybe even having them play in a loop on a 30" flat panel tv mounted on the wall as I have seen some folks do. (although that may be stretching things a bit)

The flatbed scanner I own is the 6th or so one down in the list that Larry posted. Epson Perfection V500 (mine is the previous version to the one currently for sale). As I mentioned it worked good for the 30 or so negatives/slides I got scanned, but it is a very slow process and I'd like to get this done over the next several months if possible.

Bed scanner is part of your problem.

Takes time to load the adapter, time to scan the entire adapter then if the software does not have a way of automatically cutting the slides into separate files you have to manually do that process.

Additionally, because each slide may have variations in brightness, contrast, color, tint you will have to manually correct each one.. Not to mention, EVERY ROLL of film varies greatly and ages differently so that needs to be corrected for.

My old dedicated slide/negative scanner while it can be a bit slow, is most likely much faster than dealing with a bed scanner.

I can easily process 40 slides in 15 minutes with minor touch ups on each slide.. That is about 160 slides per hr.

Typically would do about 80 slides per evening and that was while watching TV and during commercials..

Yeah, there are folks using bed scanners with the slide adapters with decent results.but to me, that is a less efficient way and less prescanning control than a dedicated slide/negative scanner.

As far as sending out goes, yeah, that is still going to take time. Checked Sam's photo processing website, you will be looking at min 3 week turn around and they do send them out to a third party vendor.

Sam's website kind of has slides hidden, so HERE is the link..

The vendor they are using is YESVIDEO and you can contact them directly if you go to their website and get the phone number.. You can ask them what resolution they are using.. I would think it should be at least 4,200 DPI..