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Microstock Photography Forum - General => General Photography Discussion => Topic started by: hollyjauch on October 13, 2009, 23:32

Title: Where to send slides to be professionally scanned?
Post by: hollyjauch on October 13, 2009, 23:32

I am looking for a place to have color slides and b&w negatives professionally scanned. I'm looking for the highest resolution (4,000 ppi). I have found a few places on-line (White Glove, ScanCafe) but most require you to mail them in (some to India) which makes me nervous. Has anyone had a particularly good experience (or bad experience) with any of the scanning services.

I would really appreciate a recommendation based on your experience.

Thanks!

Title: Re: Where to send slides to be professionally scanned?
Post by: cascoly on October 14, 2009, 14:04

Quote from: hollyjauch on October 13, 2009, 23:32

I am looking for a place to have color slides and b&w negatives professionally scanned. I'm looking for the highest resolution (4,000 ppi). I have found a few places on-line (White Glove, ScanCafe) but most require you to mail them in (some to India) which makes me nervous. Has anyone had a particularly good experience (or bad experience) with any of the scanning services.

I would really appreciate a recommendation based on your experience.

Thanks!

i've used scancafe for a coupla years now, scaning about 2000 slides and would recommend them highly

i use the 'professional services at 4000 dpi with manual crrections - i really like the fact that you can review all images online & only pay for the ones you want.

some caveats - the scans tend to eliminate colors on some sunset , golden  lighting, etc, but at the price, it's a reasonable tradeoff.  also, the scans tend to be grainy - which is proably a function of the slides themselves

however, i've had no trouble getting these scanned images accepted, usally reducing the image to 4000MP, sometimes using noise reduction

steve

Title: Re: Where to send slides to be professionally scanned?
Post by: goldenangel on October 14, 2009, 14:52

Thanks for the recommendation, Steve. I've been looking to scan my slides as well and I really like what ScanCafe offers. I doubt I wold be using scans of my slides for stock, but then, who knows, if the quality is good enough, I could do that as well.

Title: Re: Where to send slides to be professionally scanned?
Post by: weknow on October 14, 2009, 15:00

Here is a link to a list of scan-services in different countries recommended by Alamy and working with Alamy's standards.

http://www.alamy.com/stock-photography-scanner.asp (http://www.alamy.com/stock-photography-scanner.asp)

Title: Re: Where to send slides to be professionally scanned?
Post by: madelaide on October 14, 2009, 15:09

From my own experience scanning slides in dedicated film scanners (2100 and 3200 dpi):
- Unless you have very good lens and used low grain film, high-res scans return soft images with a lot of noise.
- You need a lot of time retouching images.
- I haven't tried uploading high res scans to micros nor Alamy, and I believe that they would mostly be rejected given the current standards
- It is nevertheless interesting to have your images scanned and they can be good to sell (I've sold some directly without any complaint.

I would send slides to a good company just to save the time and, in some cases, save precious moments that are registered in the slides.

Title: Re: Where to send slides to be professionally scanned?
Post by: goldenangel on October 14, 2009, 15:45

I have read reviews about ScanCafe aournd and they all seem very positive. The only downside is that it takes a long time to process an order (up to 3 months). I also found a 20% discount code. Just enter FOCUS during checkout.