Pro scanning options

We can provide scans with 4000 dpi resolution, TIFF format, or even "raw" unprocessed scans.

You don't have to be a working professional photographer to appreciate some of the extra scanning features we have available:

• Pro Resolution, $0.09 per scan
• TIFF format, $0.19 per scan
• USB drive, $99.95 per drive
• Pro Library, $0.24 per scan

The prices for these features are in addition to the scanning price—for example, a 35mm negative scanned at pro resolution would cost $0.38, since $0.09 would be added to the standard price of $0.29.

Pro Resolution

Our standard scanning resolutions of 7MP for 35mm slides & negatives, and 600 dpi for photos, is suitable for lots of enlargements. But if you want to take a 35mm slide or negative and make a a print bigger than 13" x 9" with terrific image quality, you'll want our Pro Resolution option.

With just this option selected, we'll scan 35mm slides & negatives at 4000dpi (24MP), creating 11MB processed jpg files that you can use to print all the way up to 16" x 20" and beyond. Prints will be scanned at 1200 dpi, which should be suitable for a 4x enlargement from the original.

TIFF format

Our standard JPG format images are useful for most applications. But when making poster-sized images, or when color space is critical, you may want to consider delivery in a TIFF format. This format is “lossless”, meaning the file is not compressed as it is with a JPG. Consequently, however, these files are very, very large. A typical slide scanned at 3000 dpi saved in TIFF format would be about 70MB in size (vs. about 5MB for a similar JPG). A few hundred pictures could quickly fill up the hard drive on your ordinary working computer, and it's best not to store these files solely on DVD.

USB drive

TIFF format is wonderful for many applications, but it uses a lot of storage space.

If you're ordering TIFF format delivery, or if you just have an order that's more than a few thousand images, you may want to consider delivery by USB drive, which is priced at $99.95. Many of our professional customers find managing one single hard drive much more convenient than handling multiple DVDs or CDs.

We currently supply Western Digital "Passport" portable drives. These drives are simple to use, light and easy to carry, and require no power adapter (for power, they connect to your computer via a USB cable). Our current drives are 160GB in size, which is about 40 times the capacity our formatted DVDs.

Pro Library

This is particularly popular with our museum and gallery customers, though it's often chosen by individual customers as well. Pro Library gives you two complete sets of images. The first set is in compressed JPG file format with all of our manual image processing applied (cropping, scratch removal, color correction, red eye removal, etc.) The second set consists of the “raw” scan with no image processing applied, and in our lossless TIFF file format.

Other options

• Additional disc sets
  When placing your order, it's just a single click of your mouse to order extra copies of your order, for family and friends. Why not? Particularly if you don't have a way on your computer to write data DVDs or CDs, this is a convenient extra, and reasonably priced at just $7.95 for each extra DVD or $3.95 for each extra CD.

• Carousels & albums
  If you don't have the time to remove your slides from their slide carousel, or to remove your photos from their photo albums, we will be happy to manually remove them for you, and put them back after scanning (in the exact order we found them). However, because carousels and photo albums are heavy and bulky, they are expensive to ship, and because of the additional labor in removing and replacing them, we must pass on a surcharge of $4.95 per carousel $9.95 per photo album. Note, some slide projectors used metal cartridges, rather than carousels, and for our purposes each of those cartridges counts as a carousel.