Common Questions
Why types of slides do you scan?Is there anything that you won't or can't scan?
Do you scan 35mm negatives?
Do you scan prints?
How can I get you my slides?
If I have a lot of slides what do you offer by way of volume discounts?
What precautions do you use to ensure my slides do not get lost or damaged?
What happens if a slide does get lost or damaged?
Can I order my slides or put them in groups so they will be scanned in an organized way?
What forms of payment do you accept?
Do you charge sales tax?
Do you need payment up front?
If you want me to give you a check with my slides, and I don't know how many exactly slides that I have should I count them first?
How long will my slides take to be scanned?
Do you crop and rotate the images?
What type of post processing do you do to the images?
How will you return the image files to me?
What if I am unsatisfied with the quality of the results? Do you offer Refunds?
What format are the images saved in?
Now that I have all these images, how can I look at them?
Can I print the files that you give me?
Can I play the DVD/CD that you give me on a DVD player on my TV?
What happens if the CD or DVD that you give me doesnt work?
Can I load the images on my computer and make further edits or do other creative things with them?
If I have any special needs as far as processing or scanning are concerned can you accomadate them?
What if I have a question that was not answered on this page?
Why types of slides do you scan?
Our scanner will accomadate any standard 2" by 2" slide. Even though slides of this type are generally 35mm, we will scan anything that will physically fit in the scanner. If you have any doubts or questions about our ability to scan a certain slide type, the best thing to do is to send us a handful of the different types that you have. Then we will be able to tell if it the slides will feed and scan easily, and at the same time, you can also know exactly the quality that your images will be.
Is there anything that you won't or can't scan?
We cannot scan slides that will not fit into our scanner. We can also not scan slides that will not feed easily into the scanner. This includes slides that have been very badly warped or damaged in a way that would not allow us to scan them using our autoloading feeder. If you have slides that you need scanned that are in bad shape, contact us and we can give you a quote on how much we would charge to scan them one at a time. We also cannot scan slides that have mold or fungus growth.
We refuse to scan images that we consider to be explicit or pornographic in any way. We have to look at each individual image to ensure it is cropped and rotated correctly and will know very soon if there are slides of this type included in your order. While we generally try to accomadate our customers in modifying our workflow to fit their needs, we will not change our stance on this topic for any reason. If there are slides that we consider to be offensive, your order will be terminated, you will be charged for the slides we have scanned, your slides will be returned, and the balance of your money will be refunded. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason.
Do you scan 35mm negatives?
At this time, we do not scan 35mm negatives as our equipment and process is best suited for 35mm slides.
Do you scan prints?
We do not scan prints of pictures as our equipment is not capable of scanning them.
How can I get you my slides?
We prefer that you drop the slides off in person to avoid the added risk that comes with shipping them. If you do prefer to ship them or it is unreasonable to drop them off, make sure that you pack them well and insure them as we cannot be held responsible for damage or loss that occurs during shipping.
If I have a lot of slides what do you offer by way of volume discounts?
We do offer volume discounts, if you have over 1000 slides, we offer a 10% discount, which turns out to be a little over 23 cents a slide. If you have more than 2000 slides, we offer a 25% discount, making them 20 cents a slide.
What precautions do you use to ensure my slides do not get lost or damaged?
To ensure that your slides do not get lost we keep them in the original box that you gave us whenever possible. We put away all other slides before beginning a new order so that they will not get mixed up. We never have more than one customer's slides out at a time.
To ensure that your slides do not get damaged we always the utmost care and caution when handling slides. We also do not allow food or drink or any water for that matter near the scanning area. We also use a scanner that is desigened never to damage slides. If there is a jam during the scanning process, the trouble slide can be removed without damage to it or other slides.
What happens if a slide does get lost or damaged?
We have scanned thousands of slides and have yet to have a slide get lost or damaged. If this does occur, however, our terms and conditions state that we cannot be held responsible for the damage beyond the cost of the slide itself.
Can I order my slides or put them in groups so they will be scanned in an organized way?
We will scan your slides in the order that you give them to us and maintain your groupings. The only stipulation is that due to the nature of our scanner, we cannot maintain groups that are smaller than 50 slides, as we have to stop and start the scanner with each new group. As long as you keep your groups above 50 slides per group, we will deliver them as you grouped them.
What forms of payment do you accept?
We prefer to be paid via a check, but we also accept cash, debit, or credit card.
Do you charge sales tax?
We do charge Utah state sales tax.
Do you need payment up front?
If you are paying with a check, we do prefer to have payment up front. We will hold on the check until a few days until your order is ready, we will then deposit it with enough time for it to clear before we give you your slides back.
If you want me to give you a check with my slides, and I don't know how many exactly slides that I have should I count them first?
Counting your slides is not necessary, they will be counted by our scanner. If you are paying up front what you can do is make an estimate as to how many slides that you have, give us a check for that amount, and then we can refund or bill you the balance if there is any. The same is true for return shipping.
How long will my slides take to be scanned?
This is not an easy question to answer as there are many thing to be taken into account. We generally have other slides that we are scanning and since we scan on a first come, first serve basis, your slides may have to wait to be scanned until the others are done. Also the rate at which we can scan is dependent on the quality of the slides, if they are in good shape and do not jam our scanner, we can scan them a lot faster than if we constantly have to be unjamming or manually feeding your slides.
All that being said, if you need a rough estimate as far as turn around time goes, we can generally scan 100 of your slides a day with a few days to process them. For example, if you have 500 slides, we can generally turn them around in about a week.
If turn around time is very important to you, make sure that you contact us and, knowing our current scan load, we can give you a much better idea of when to expect your slides to be completed.
The one exception that we do make is if you are having us scan a handful of slides to see our quality before you decide to scan all your slides, we can generally have those done the next day.
Do you crop and rotate the images?
Inherent in slide scanning is thick black borders around all our images. We crop these and rotate the images to what we think is the correct orientation. If we are going to err, however, we choose to err on the side of cropping too little as oposed to cropping too much. Because of this, your slides may contain very thin black borders, or square black borders around the sometimes rounded slide corners.
What type of post processing do you do to the images?
All of our images are processed using Digital ICE to remove dust and scratches from the image. This is more than a software process, as the scanner actually does an extra scanning pass with an infrared light to determine where dust and scratches are located, and it removes them. The results that you see on the our process page are very typical of the improvement obtained by using Digital ICE.
We also apply color correction to images. When we scan your slides, usually what will happen is that some of the slides will turn our great without fiddling with them. Other slides will come our with an orrange or red hue and still others will come out with a blue hue. This is typical of older slides. We try to remove these hues using color correcting software. The results on the our process page are a pretty good indicator of what you can expect from this process. Although we have become very proficient at adjusting the color of images, we do not have the time to meticulusly scrutinize and adjust each image.
All that being said, we cannot put more quality into the image than that which was originally there. If the picture itself was taken out of focus or with horrible lighting, there is little or nothing that can be done to correct it.
If you are curious about the quality of your scanned images, your best bet is to let us scan a half dozen or so, so that you can get a good feel for the type of image that you will receive.
We can of course customize this process to fit your individual needs, contact us with any specific questions.
How will you return the image files to me?
We generally use CDs or DVDs to return image files depending on how many slides that you have. A CD can hold about 65 JPG slides, and a DVD about 400. We do not charge for the media that your slides are returned to you on. If you want extra copies of the discs that contain your slides, we charge $2.00 per DVD and 50 cents per CD. You can of course make your own copies on your computer.
If you want us to scan TIFF or RAW files, they are much bigger (ten times as big generally) and optical media is no longer reasonable. Contanct us if this is a concern for you.
What if I am unsatisfied with the quality of the results? Do you offer Refunds?
We cannot put more quality into the image than that which was originally there. If a picture was taken out of focus, or with poor lighting, there is little or nothing that can be done to correct it. We do not charge for slides that come out all black or all white. We will rescan any slide that you belive was not scanned correctly free of charge, but we cannot offer a refund for images that you either do not want, or come out with less than optimal image quality due to no fault of ours.
What format are the images saved in?
We generally deliver images in JPG format. Since we scan at 4000 dpi, these images come out to be about 17 megapixels and 9 to 11 megabytes each. This is the same image format that is used by digital cameras and is compatible with all image viewers and editors worth using.
If you need the images in a different format such as TIFF or RAW or with 16 bits per channel, just contact us and we can work out the details. We do not charge extra for such workflow modifications.
Now that I have all these images, how can I look at them?
I believe that the best way to view your images, especially when you have so many, is with a dedicated viewing program. You can give Picasa a try (it works on Windows, Mac, and even Linux), it is free and is a great way to keep track of, print, or email your photos. Iphoto or other similar applications will also work. If you want even more control over your images, you could use Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture, which offer more by way of possible modifications to your images.
Can I print the files that you give me?
Of course! While we do not offer printing services, the images that you recive will be compatible with companies that do. You can even take the CD or DVD that we give you to a photography developing place and they can generally print them right from there.
Can I play the DVD/CD that you give me on a DVD player on my TV?
When you receive your DVD or CD, what you are reciveing is a disc with a collection of image files. Some people read into the fact that we use DVDs to mean that we create some sort of slide show that can be viewed on a television using a standard DVD player. This is not the case, all you receive is a disc with the images on it. You are then free to create a movie or slideshow that is suited for your TV and DVD player.
That being said, many DVD players (all that I have encountered, but you will have to check to make sure yours can do this) can read the discs that we give you. Check to see if your DVD player can read a CD or DVD full of JPG images. It will probably not add fancy transitions or music, but just display the images one after the other.
What happens if the CD or DVD that you give me doesnt work?
If any optical meadia that we give you doesn't work, we will remake the media and ship it to you free of charge.
Can I load the images on my computer and make further edits or do other creative things with them?
Of course! our images will work great with any software that has the ability to work with images,including digital scrapbooking software, or movie creation software.
If I have any special needs as far as processing or scanning are concerned can you accomadate them?
We try to do everything in our power to accomadate your individual needs, from not cropping or color correcting, to the delivered file format, we can generally make any modification to our workflow free of charge. Make sure that you contact us, however, for specific details.
What if I have a question that was not answered on this page?
For any other question or comment, please contact us anytime via email, chat, or telephone.