I wonder how they determine that 1.5 million have already signed up and paid when the "back end" has not even been written.

I have converted a collection of hundreds of 35 mm slides to digital using a Cannon canoscan 9950F. I tried a copy method that could copy 3 or 4 slides at a time which was very slow. Using this flat bed scanner with a 34 mm adapter I could copy several at a time and decide how many pixels I wanted for each slide. Might take a look at this scanner.