Scanning Black and White Negatives

We're proud and excited to deliver an industry breakthrough—an affordable, high-quality black & white negative scanning service:

• Scanned and repaired by hand
• High 11MP resolution, 4000 dpi available
• Door-to-door, safe and guaranteed tracking
• $0.37 per negative/slide (35mm)$1.95 per negative (medium format)
• Free scratch removal included

Common Black & White Image Scanning Problem: Scratching

A typical amount of scratching on a black and white negative. Photo: W Bradley.

Negatives are well known for scratching, and black & white negatives especially so. Unlike chromogenically color-processed negatives, they contain grains of silver halide. Brittle, these grains easily scratch the surface of the negative, even when handled gently (jostling inside the negative envelope itself can often be enough to scratch the film), making tiny scratches that are not visible to the naked eye. Unfortunately, when the negative is scanned and the image is enlarged, these tiny scratches can be so numerous and large, relative to the image, that they nearly ruin it. To compound the problem, dust particles on the surface of black and white negatives are much more noticeable than on, say, the surface of a color negative.

What Sets Our B&W Scanning Services Apart

Our Proprietary Solution

The same photo as above, handled under our new process, for $0.37 an image.

We recognize that there are many serious photographers with large analog archives of negatives. But scanning black and white negatives the right way requires training and advanced scanning capabilities. After months of research and testing with some of our professional customers, we've launched a black and white negative scanning service that harnesses our usual ScanCafe strengths and invents a new one:

Repair Black & White Negative By Hand

We scan all of our images, by hand, not just black and white negatives. But here, because the number of scratches is potentially infinite, our process is to enlarge your image to 100 percent of its maximum resolution (3900 x 2600 pixels) and remove the defects visible at that zoom level on our reference displays.

A Good Black & White Scanning Service is Hard to Find

Many services scan color negatives, but they usually rely on software alone to digitally remove scratches. The most common of these packages are reasonably effective in two conditions: (1) when the scratch is relatively small; and (2) when the image being analyzed is from a typical color process. With black & white negatives, the silver halide grains (the same grains that cause the scratching in the first place!) cause artifacts in the scan that do not produce a clean image for competitors to process. Consequently, many services don't offer to scan black & white negatives at all—or, if they do, they don't offer any scratch removal at all. That can lead to some pretty unsatisfactory images, like the one above.