Archival Scanning to Digital for Negatives, Slides and Prints Why Scan? There are several reasons to consider scanning your slides, negatives and prints. First and foremost is the preservation of your photos. Whether they are valuable business materials or family vacation photos, they are priceless to you. Therefore, you should do everything possible to protect them. After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the Gulf Coast and destroyed literally millions of family memories, people realized they needed to do something to preserve their images. The second reason is accessibility. All those photos sitting in boxes can't be shared. Suppose you are looking for a picture from your third birthday in 1965? Unless you are incredibly organized, you could spend hours going through albums and shoeboxes to find it. With the advances in digital technology, there are many easy organizing softwares available for you to catalog your photos for instantaneous access. Digital will continue to provide new ways for you to share your photos easily, and our film scanning service will get you there.
Should I do it myself or send them out? Most people think its simple just to spend a couple of hundred bucks on a flatbed scanner or a film scanner and they are set. All they see is the money they THINK they save. What about the time invested? If you only have a few hundred images, does it pay to spend $200 on a quality scanner, when you can get them done better and cheaper elsewhere? Ask yourself these questions: Are you familiar with resolution, pixels and file size? How about RGB compared to CMYK files? The difference between TIFFS and JPEGS? Should you embed the color profile in the image, and which color profile should you use? Are you familiar with color management? What about Digital ICE? Did you make sure to calibrate your monitor before beginning? Otherwise what looks great on your screen may be dark or off color on another computer. The learning curve for these questions is steep. Do you really have the time to invest in this? An experienced scanner can scan maybe 30 images an hour on a flatbed scanner, whether they are scanning slides, prints or negatives to digital. If you use any automated correction functions such as Digital ICE, it will take longer. Even at $10/hour, you're already talking 35 cents an image, not counting post-production time, and I'm sure your time is worth more than that. Then, add to that the storage media and the scanner cost, and you've spent much more than you would sending it out. In addition, you would probably do this at night and on weekends, instead of spending time with family. If you consider how many images you have, the time commitment is huge. at 40 hours a week, thats a MAXIMUM of 1200 images a week. Suppose you have 5000 or even 10000 images or more. You are talking a month or two of full time scanning. Now, if you only have 6-8 hours a weekend to devote to this, thats only 200-250 images per weekend. That's almost 6 MONTHS of weekends if you have 5000 images. You say you don't have that many? Sure you do. Every photo is a memory. Why are you going to spend hours deciding which ones to scan and which ones to not? To save a few pennies? Think about it.
Why choose us? Those same questions that you asked yourself above also apply to sending your photos out to be scanned. Does the place you are considering sending them to know all about color profiles, file size, resolution, etc? If they've only been in business a few years, probably not. Do you really want the cheapest place to scan your film? That usually means cutting corners. Think British Petroleum and the Gulf Oil Spill from the Deepwater Horizon rig. See what happens when you try to cut corners to save money? If you are shopping for the cheapest price on scanning services then we are most likely not your place. We offer quality scanning at reasonable prices. Unlike the numerous companies that have surfaced in recent years, we have extensive experience in dealing with images. Some companies got into photo scanning recently, just to make a quick buck. Others package and ship your priceless images overseas, taking advantage of the lower wages they can pay in places like India and Asia. They hire large numbers of minimum wage workers and sit them in front of a bank of scanners, with YOUR photos. All of our technicians have at least a decade of experience in digital scanning and have years of background in handling your photos, from the days of developing and printing film to today. We have also worked closely for years scanning photos and film to digital format for many corporate and commercial clients, including Tulane and Loyola Universities, LSU and Tulane Medical Centers, the Louisiana Supreme Court, the Historic New Orleans Collection and many state and local government agencies. We have scanned everything from regular photographs and 35mm slides and negatives, to black and white 4x5 negatives from the 1920's and large glass lantern slides from the late 1800's. We know what it takes to properly handle your photos. We also provide a level of personal service that you won't find in larger companies. To us, your family photos from last year are every bit as important as historic images from the 19th century. So, when choosing who you want to trust your images to, don't base your decision on who has the fanciest website or the biggest clients. Choose someone who will treat your images as if they were their own.
Volume Archiving of Large Slide Collections One of our specialties is large volume slide scanning to digital of personal and institutional 35mm slide collections. Whether your collection is 100, 1000, 10,000, or even 100,000 slides, we will work with you to customize the job to meet your needs. See our standard pricing below, or contact us by phone or email Robert for a custom quote on your specific project.
Regardless of your needs, we will use of experience to scan your slides for web use, digital reproduction, and digital files for historical archiving purposes.
Some of our many scanning projects include doing work for:
Tulane University School of Architecture: collections of historical slides
Tulane Newcomb Art Slide Library: collections of archival slides
Ochsner Hospital MediaProduction Services: collections of medical slides for Powerpoint use
The Latin American Library at Tulane University: archiving collections of historic 35mm and glass lantern slides, glass negatives, and historic manuscripts
The Historic New Orleans Collection: archiving collections of historic 35mm slides
The Middle American Research Institute (MARI): archiving collections of historic 35mm and glass lantern slides, along with large format black and white film and glass negatives
Numerous private collections of important slides
Pricing
At Moldaner's Digital Imaging, we know that every job has unique requirements and expectations, and not every project can fit neatly into a basic pricing structure. If you are a government agency, educational institution, museum, or just a photographer with specific scanning needs above what our standard services offer, please contact us for a customized quote. We are experienced in dealing with large and complex projects.
If you are preparing to ship images to us, please contact us in advance for packaging recommendations and approximate turnaround time for your order.
Our Equipment
Slide Scanners For 35mm slides we use a Kodak HR500 Plus scanner. This unit can scan at high resolutions, creating scans up to 128Mb in size. The HR500 can scan as many as 300 slides an hour, which allows us to scan large quantities of slides at a reasonable cost. This is the same scanner that is used by many museums, educational institutions, libraries and US government agencies for archiving their vast collections of slides. Occasionally, if there are only a few slides or a specific need, we will use our Nikon Coolscan 9000 or 5000 scanners.
Negative Scanners For 35mm and medium format negatives we use a Nikon Coolscan 9000. This unit is the preferred scanner for most professional photographers because of its high resolution capabilities (up to 4000 ppi) and its ability to also scan medium format. We also use this scanner for small quantities of 35mm slides and for medium format slides. At times, we also use a Nikon Coolscan 5000, which has the same capabilities except medium format scanning.
Print Scanners If you need exhibition quality prints from your original photos, we use an Epson V750 Pro flatbed scanner. This unit has a high resolution dual lens optical scanning system for scans up to 9600 dpi. In addition, we also offer a low cost batch-scanning print service through our Kodak i1210S scanner.
Kodak HR500 Plus Scanner w/ AutoSlide Carousel
Nikon Coolscan 9000ED Film Scanner
Epson V750 Pro Scanner
From Our Customers
Read what our clients have to say about our services.
"Moldaner's restored over thirty composites of Tulane Law Review staffs that date from the late 1920's to the 1970's. The individual photos in the originals were different sizes and in various stages of deterioration. After interviewing several companies, it was clear that Moldaner's attention to detail and sound work ethic were the components essential to preserving and vastly improving these priceless archives. They scanned hundreds of images, improved the quality, made them uniform, and created new composites. They also digitally preserved the images for archival purposes, as well as providing a DVD backup. They look fabulous! Moldaner's exceptional skills, work product, and fair pricing have made saving these pictures for posterity effortless for me. I can now rest assured that, in the event of an evacuation, these irreplaceable images are safe."
--Lynn Becnel, Manager, Editorial Services Tulane University Law School New Orleans, LA
"I have used Moldaner’s Camera and Imaging for a variety of services, including photograph enlargements, exhibit preparation, scanning projects involving 35mm slides, negatives, and variously-sized prints, and others. The quality of their work and level of professional service is excellent. Mr. Moldaner goes beyond the call of duty in that he is always willing to discuss your project, make suggestions on what would work best, and then perform the work in a timely manner. He aims to please. In the past, I would submit work orders or projects to other businesses that perform similar tasks, and cross my fingers that it would turn out right. When I go to Moldaner’s with a job, I have full confidence that things will turn out just as I want them. I feel like I am in good hands there."
--David Dressing, PhD Curator of Manuscripts and Image Archives The Latin American Library, Tulane University New Orleans, LA
