Jim’s Slide Scanning Business Blog

Over the last 22 days, 21 orders have been received here.  I’m continually amazed at the growing demand for slides to digital conversion services.

A Testimonial:

One customer had the same 30 slides scanned at about 10 different local scan service providers, including mine.  He told me the quality of the scans I did was better, by far, than any of the others.  He told me this after dropping of 440 slides for 2710PPI.  That batch is just a small portion of the work he wants done.  He left a portable hard drive to put his scans on.  He wants both edits and no edits versions.

Of his 440 scans, there are 22 which I’m not billing him for.  Those at “no charge” are difficult scans from high contrast slides or slides that were out-of-focus.

I thought after the Christmas rush, I’d see a slowdown in orders coming in.  Not so.  My phone continues to ring off-the-hook with people calling about digitizing their slides.

For example: Simon, a physician in PA called about his archive of about 2000 slides, mostly X-Rays and CT scans. Ron, a photographer, called about his collection of about 1000-2000 slides.

Orders from repeat customers continue to make up a large portion of the work.  Some examples are Sam L., an adventurer/photographer/writer.  Sam dropped off his first batch here about a month ago.  Sam looks a bit like Sean Connery, beard included.  Sam travels a lot and is currently in Maine.  His second batch of slides was delivered last week.

Dudley, from western Massachusetts has been sending his slides, in batches, for about the last year and a half. Dudley displays his scans using a digital projector. He shoots mostly with Fuji Velvia because he loves saturated colors.  Dudley asks that I increase the brightness and saturation in his scans to account for the loss a digital projector brings.

John G. from Rhode Island has been sending his slide carousels, 1 or 2 trays at a time, over the last 2 years.

A pathologist in NY has sent several orders recently.  Most of her slides are made using a camera and a microscope to show microscopic cells etc.

Slide scan orders are booming.  Liz in NJ sent me ~3750 slides, that’s about 31 trays!  She’s not in a hurry, which is good. I don’t like pressure. We’re splitting the lot into three batches.

A couple of local customers dropped off slides this week.  Bill delivered about 144 Kodachromes, many were water damaged years ago.  Another customer from Cambridge MA dropped off 2 trays for conversion to digital.  He plans to present a slide show using a digital projector at a relative’s birthday party.

A few of the other orders this month were from a pathologist in Virginia, (slides to PPT)  a cosmetic surgeon in Massachusetts and an industrial safety instructor in Maryland. Today a shipment of slides arrived from a pathologist in California.

As I did in 2007, I’ll be shutting down the slide scanning business for the month of July, in 2008.

Due to scheduled vacations and a much-needed break, I’ll ask that no orders be shipped after June 25th and no large orders, over 500 slides, after June 21st.

Incoming shipments can resume on July 31st.

During last year’s shut down, several customers called and told me they were willing to wait for operations to resume. I anticipate many will do the same this year. For those of you who cannot wait, feel free to call me ( Jim Harrington 781-244-5655 ) and ask for a referral.

For those shopping for the lowest price, please don’t bother to call for a referral. The scans service providers I refer callers to are not the lowest priced. A few of the low priced scan service providers send your slides out of the country to take advantage of low labor costs. I only make referrals to US businesses which I am familiar with, and have trust in.

I apologize for any inconvenience the shut down may cause. I hope to be able to serve your 35MM slide scanning needs after July 31st. If you plan to schedule an order delivery after the shut down, please call anytime to discuss the details. I’m not always available to take calls but if you leave a voice message, I’ll return your call. Let me know the best time to call you and the time zone you are in.

My slide scanning business is a home office based operation. Although I often receive large orders, the focus is low volume and high quality. Each and every scan is initially saved to tif format. The digital versions of your slides are then opened in Adobe PhotoShop and each photo is individually enhanced based on its specific characteristics.

Improvements are made, where needed, to improve the exposure, color and to enhance shadow detail. Where feasible, I remove red-eye and clone-out specks and spots which the Digital Ice Dust and Scratch removal left behind. I avoid using automated processes like ROC which automatically enhance scans. ROC can have undesirable results when applied to most slide scans. ( I occasionally use ROC on batches of slides which have a VERY strong color cast due to age. Sometimes very old Ektachrome’s, Anscochromes and Agfachromes have a strong red, blue or purple cast.)

After scanning and improvements are complete, I count up the unacceptable scans and subtract that amount from the invoice…blah, blah blah.

Incoming orders to my business are fairly consistent, with growing sales each year. Any loss in orders which might be attributed to dropping prices elsewhere in the industry, are more than offset by the growing market and an increase in local, no-ship orders. Also, as my customer base grows, orders from repeat customers increase.

Doing this work part-time, from my home-office, my capacity is limited. Most of the time, orders comes in at a rate quite close to my ability to process them comfortably. It’s rare that I’m over-burdened with work. It’s also rare that I have a day with no orders to work on.

After shipping out an order to a repeat customer, a cosmetic surgeon in Massachusetts on Monday, I had a couple of enjoyable days, with no orders to work on, a smooth balance.

Today, 124 slides arrived from Richard in Los Osos, CA. His order consists entirely of Kodachrome film, shot in the mid 70’s, to be scanned at 4000 PPI.

I got an e-mail reply from a relatively new, Canada based, slide scanning service provider. I wrote to them last week suggesting we exchange links. Since I don’t serve the Canada market, I felt that exchanging links would help promote each others pages. They agreed the link exchange would be a good idea so I’ll soon be creating a page for 35MM slides & scanning related links at www.slidescanning123.com.

Yesterday, 498 scans shipped out to Sue in Greensboro, NC.

Today, 100 slides arrived from Betsy in Port Charlotte, FL.

Tomorrow, 409 scans will ship out to Gary in Santa Monica, CA.

Orders for slides to digital conversion continue to flow in. Large orders have dropped off a bit in March but the average size orders continue.

In past years, April has been a busy month with an increase in orders, possibly a result of Spring cleaning!

QuickBooks shows that sales are up over the same period last year, while my prices have not changed. That seems to indicate the film to digital market is continuing to grow.

A consistently good ranking ( for dozens of related terms ) on the big search engines helps my business. I’ve never had to pay search engines to list my scanning page, I understand it can be quite costly.

Casual readers, customers and competitors are encouraged to comment on my blogs. Comments can be added by clicking on the comments link below. Comments can be anonymous, but all comments will be moderated by me before going public.

There’s been an increase in recent orders for scanning of slides of artwork. It seems more and more artists are digitizing their artwork slides, for placement on Web sites, print making etc.

Today I shipped and order of artwork slide scans to Connecticut. While I’m sitting here working on another order of ~250 slides of art, sent from Illinois, I get get a call from Diane, an artist in Virginia, who was recommended to me by another artist. Diane is sending slides of quilts and wearable art.

The artists are coming out of the woodwork to convert slides of their art to digital image files.

Very often I get customers who have 35MM slides of artwork, usually paintings. I have found that artists are often the most difficult customers to satisfy, with scans of their artwork slides. One of the other scan service providers doesn’t guarantee scans of artwork.

The issues usually come from customers expecting the “scan” to look exactly like the art. There are several factors involved here. First, when artwork is captured on slide film, the lighting, film type and other factors impact how the slide looks, in comparison to the art.

Second, when a scan is made of that slide, the scan often does not look exactly like the slide. Third, it can be difficult get the right “white balance” on scans of artwork, especially if the art was made on paper or canvas that is not white. To get the best white balance there needs to be something white in the image.

One of my customers sent slides of art, drawn with charcoal. She called after reviewing the scans and claimed “the charcoal was pure black” yet the scans show the charcoal as slightly gray. To correct this I had to adjust the contrast on each of her scans.

Now, when customer call wanting to send slides of art, I tell them to expect the need for adjustments at their end, since I cannot make a scan look exactly like the art, when I have not seen the art!

Last week a potential customer dropped off ~2500 slides for scanning. The slides were distributed across about 30 Kodak carousel trays.

Most of the slide tray boxes had a strong smell of mold or mildew. Some of the slide tray boxes were so moldy, the cardboard had become soft and black mold was visible on the exterior of the boxes. The majority of the slides had mold or mildew visible on the actual slide. Some slides had stains which seemed to indicate there was water damage, in addition to the mold.

Due to the condition of the slides, I decided it was a project I did not want. I referred this customer to a few other local scan service providers.

If you are storing a collection of slides, make sure they are not in an extremely humid environment or in a place where they might get damaged by water.