How To Scan Slides or Photographs?

To scan at home or not to scan at home ….. that is the question!

If you have the time and have lower quality expectations, then home scanning is a viable option.

However, be prepared to have to spend a lot of time as your home or small office printer/copier/scanner for photographs will take some time to physically scan (one at a time) and then process to your computer. It can take many, many hours.

Slide scanners are available in the high street, with prices ranging from £30 to £300. Again, it will be a slow-going process, which is fine if you only have a handful of slides, but the quality will be questionable. Slide conversion is unlike photograph conversion and requires a photographic process to be adopted. So, to understand the quality, use the following example: imagine comparing a disposable 35mm camera film photograph with the latest high resolution DSLR. Both take will capture the image, but the quality will be like chalk and cheese.

Digitize Media was launched after we did just that – trying to scan our own collection of home photographs. After about 3 hours later and with just 20 photographs scanned (that still needed to be cropped and viewed at a distance (quality)), we realised that there had to be a better way of doing this. So we thought we would outsource. We visited Snappy Snaps who wanted to charge a minimum of 55p a photo. An outrageous cost considering we had 2,000 photographs. So we then attempted to find a professional looking, competitively priced on-line company. We could not find anywhere that reassured us or made the process easy.

So, we went away researched, then researched some more and came to the conclusion that with some significant financial, emotional investment mixed with some hard graft, training and determination that we actually could offer a service to “other people like us” that just wanted an easy to use, cost effective and high-quality solution to scanning and preserving valuable memories and images.  So, Digitize Media was created.

So, yes you can scan at home. If you have just a few photographs, then this may be your best option. However, if you have 100+ then Digitize Media will offer you the easy to use, reliable and cost effective service that we were looking for.