Conversion-to-digital photo service

Howell

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I have 500-1000 photos that I'd like to convert to digital and I don't really have the time or inclination to do it. Most of them would be negatives with 50 or so slides.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a good service to use? I'm thinking maybe silver standard. Not the most expensive but good quality.
 

LunarMist

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I have no recent experience with digital services. What are you doing with the output. Maybe you can find an inexpensive, used scanner and do it yourself? :cheese:
 

Howell

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I have no recent experience with digital services. What are you doing with the output. Maybe you can find an inexpensive, used scanner and do it yourself? :cheese:

Probably look at them once and do something with 1% of them. They are photos from my travels in the 90s.
 

LunarMist

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IS 3000 DPI sufficient for your needs? If the negs are 1980s era or earlier probably so, but by the 1990s the 100 ISO negative films had better resolution. Of course Kodachromes and most slow chromes since the 1990s have more detail than 3000DPI can show. At those prices I guess it does not hurt to try some.
 

LunarMist

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Oops, that overlapped. Let us know how it works out.
 

Stereodude

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FWIW, keep in mind they are sending your pictures to India to be scanned on standard Nikon slide / negative scanners. So, if you have a lot of fond memory on your negatives or slides, I wouldn't send them all at once. I'd suggest something more like every other slide and two orders.

Another option is to buy a used Nikon yourself from Craiglist / ebay, scan your stuff, and then flip it for about what you paid. Of course that will consume your time, but then the dollar price of the scanning is basically free.
 

LunarMist

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Hmm. It looks like they use Nikon 5000ED and 9000ED and Epson 4490 scanners. I owned two each of the Nikon 4000ED and 8000ED scanners, which were the slightly older respective models. None of them are really commercial volume scanners.

I don't know why the output would be 3000 DPI unless they reduce the resolution for some reason from 4000DPI. (Perhaps downsampling to 3000DPI removes artifacts and speeds their processing time.) I also don't know if that is done during scanning, but it may be done in PS before they make other adjustments. I would guess that the Nikons are set to single pass to save scan time. I found that scanning with four passes gave the best compromise of time and quality, especially for negatives. I would never downsample until final output and not usually with 35mm (~19-20 megapixels depending on cropping). Back in their day (early P4 or AMD Athlon era) a 100MP scan from 6x7 was rather cumbersome to process. ;)
 

LunarMist

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FWIW, keep in mind they are sending your pictures to India to be scanned on standard Nikon slide / negative scanners. So, if you have a lot of fond memory on your negatives or slides, I wouldn't send them all at once. I'd suggest something more like every other slide and two orders.

:crap: So that is why is takes 4-6 weeks. I would go elsewhere. :erm:
 

Howell

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Thanks all! I took the day to do some culling and it looks like the final count is now closer to 300 (mix of prints, neg and slides).

I wouldn't be horribly upset if I lost them all. One might justifiably wonder why I would spend ~$100 to digitize pictures I don't mind losing. Still working on that one.
 

LunarMist

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Not at all. Why did I spend about 5K so far to store 4-6x all the images I never will use?
 
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