Recently, I’ve seen posts inquiring about slide scanning services, so I thought I would share my experience.
A few years ago I started a project to digitize approximately 4000 Kodachrome slides taken over 40 years, during which we lived in countries such as Switzerland, Sweden, and Japan. The images ran the gamut from carefully composed landscapes shot from a tripod to impromptu photos of our kids as they grew up. I did not want to go through the tedium of doing the scans myself, as well as buying a high quality scanner that I would eventually try to sell once the project was finished. So I investigated commercial slide scanning services.
Reviews of the major services were readily available on line. While I considered price, I was much more interested in image quality. I wanted scans, provided as TIFF files, that would most closely match the originals, and any post-processing would be done by me. ScanCafe seemed to have the best reputation, but, for me, it was not the right choice. It charged extra for TIFF files, and I had some reservations about the shipping risks and time associated with their doing the work in India. (They now offer an option to have the work done in the US.)
I first placed two orders with the Archival Company in New Jersey (
https://archivalcompany.com). The results were generally good, but some slides were cropped inappropriately; e.g. cutting out mountain peaks or towers rather than space at the bottom of the image or cutting a boat in half rather than cropping the sky. I was also not pleased when they sent the second order on a jump drive rather than the requested DVDs that I wanted as a backup storage medium. Additionally, I wanted better resolution than the 3600 DPI they offered.
Next I tried the services of DpsDave in Oregon (
http://www.dpsdave.com). I was especially drawn to the 6000 DPI resolution. TIFFS were provided as a no-charge option. The scans for the first order were great, except again for some unfortunate cropping. The second order, however, was disappointing. Some of the scans lacked acceptable sharpness (and by sending the same slides to another service, I was able to determine that the problem was not with the originals). Also, some of the colors, especially on night scenes, were way off, and it was difficult to process them back to the original colors.
So I moved on to Filmfix.com in Ojai, California (
http://www.filmfix.com). The results were easily the best of the three services I used, and I completed the bulk of the project with them. The scans were 6048 x 4032 pixels, in TIFF format. I made use of the option to have the edge of the slide frame scanned, so that I would not lose any part of the image and could then crop out the frame in post processing. The service was not entirely perfect; some of the greys (a granite mountainside for example) took on a slightly purple tinge, but this was easily corrected in post processing.
I don’t think any of the companies did a particularly good job of removing dust before doing the scans.
As you might imagine, there is a lot of work to such a project, even when you contract out the actual scanning. However, it’s also been very rewarding, -- not only to relive the experience of when first taking the image but also post processing many of them. I had quite a few images that I thought were very good, but were remarkably better after post processing (Adobe raw editor and occasionally Photoshop Elements).