ScanCafe

I just realized that I never posted a final review of my ScanCafe experience. Well, after nearly three months of waiting, I received a nice little box from ScanCafe with a fancy DVD (full-size case with custom art) and my original photos in the shoddy packaging I had originally sent them in.

After dropping all the photos from the DVD into Lightroom, it’s safe to say that ScanCafe did a stellar job scanning and cleaning these 28 year old snapshots. The color restoration is better than the test scans I tried on my Epson scanner (which took nearly 20 minutes a photo) and the level of grain is as good (or bad) as one would expect from aging photos. Read the rest of this entry »

So, nearly two months after I placed my order, ScanCafe sent me the email I had been waiting for. My photos were ready for review. Just about 170 snapshots dating back to 1979 were available online for me to peruse, reject, and order. Just as Pop Photo stated in their review a few months back, the scans were excellent and the restoration quality is top notch. Sure, the quality on some is grainy and far from crisp, but the source material wasn’t exactly pro-shot.

In the end, I rejected seven photos (you can reject up to 50% of the order), paid for the rest and checked out. The only problem was that whenever I tried to share the photos with anyone (including myself), I would get a failure notice. For nearly a week, no one could see the photos, and they didn’t appear for me when I logged in. After a few calls to ScanCafe, I got through to Matt who personally walked through the problem, gave me his email so I could show him what was wrong, and fixed it within 24-hours. Again, great support if you can get someone on the phone. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my biggest regrets as a photographer is not better maintaining my archive of negatives. And by better maintaining, I mean not throwing out. I accidentally tossed hundreds of negatives when I moved and miss them dearly. Recently I stumbled across a box of negatives in my parents attic from shows dating back to 2001. Excited, I ran to my place and began scanning them using my consumer-level negative scanner. The results were ugly.

Around the same time, my mom gave me a few photo albums of me as a baby that was in pretty sad shape. The shots were yellow, the pages tathered. I put them through my scanner, using the color restore setting and the results weren’t much better than the negatives. Stray hairs, color streaking, grain–it was sad.

So I did some searching and stumbled across ScanCafe, a photo digitizing center in San Francisco that outsources photo and negative scanning duties to India. They got rave reviews in Pop Photo and the prices are extremely reasonable. Read the rest of this entry »