As my business partner and I continue to grow our photography business, we have been looking to build our portfolio.  As he has many more years experience with photography than I, namely weddings, we lean a lot on his body of work.  As a testimony to his ability, he shot my wedding, and did so with a Pentax medium format camera.  While the photos were great, the drawback is having the work in negatives when we need them digitally to work them into our website, studio books, etc.

While I have a scanner, time is something that is more precious and limited.  Also, each time I scan images they have a lot of artifacts, etc., which I would love to avoid.  It would be great to send off the negatives and get a disc back with the digital hi-res scans.  I heard about ScanCafe through listening to This Week In Photography podcast and thought that I would give them a try.

The ScanCafe process is pretty simple.  You sign up and pay for a part of your order first.  You send off your negatives for them to scan.  Once scanned, you get to review them online and decide which ones you want to have scanned and burned onto a DVD.  You finalize your order and your negatives and a DVD is mailed back.

The one drawback I have heard about the services ScanCafe provides is the time frame.  Meaning, no quick turn around.  So going in I was ready to just evaluate the service minus the turn around time.  However, it is important to note here how it all went down just in case you opt to try their services yourself.

• October 14th, 2009: Placed the original order for 135 35mm color negatives
• October 22nd, 2009: ScanCafe acknowledged the receipt of the negatives and provided an estimated online date for review of November 17th, 2009
• November 4th, 2009: Notice from support that the negatives were medium format and not 35mm, with a request to proceed
• November 17th, 2009: Notice that the scans were online for review
• December 1st, 2009: Deadline extension for online review
• December 7th, 2009: Order finalized
• December 17th, 2009: Order was shipped back
• December 24th, 2009: Negatives and DVD of digital scans were received

So as you can see, it did take some time.  Now, the delays in the process were due to me, not ScanCafe.  I selected 35mm rather than medium format.  What this triggered was request from ScanCafe as to how to proceed.  The price difference was $0.29 for a 35mm scan versus $0.99 for a medium format scan.  I was going to have them scanned no matter what, but certainly appreciate the chance to acknowledge the price difference before continuing.

I also waited too long to place the final order online than I should have.  I received the notice that the images were online but waited a week before finishing the order.  I was a little surprised that it took from December 7th to December 17th to burn the DVD and ship it back, given that all of the images had already been scanned.

I have to give credit to them though, as they did better on the packaging than I did.  I got packing peanuts and bubble wrap of my binder and DVD.

The DVD has a label sealing the case that has the signature of the person who scanned the images.  Nice touch!

As for the quality of the scans, I could not be happier.  The quality was outstanding and far exceeded anything I had expected.  Each JPG on the DVD was 8757 x 6391 in size and of suitable resolution to print a 24×36. In fact, they appeared no different than the images shot with our D700 & D3 DSLRs. I was mainly impressed with the clean and crisp scans.  There were no artifacts, dust, blemishes, etc.

I brought all of the images into Lightroom and was able to quickly start editing as I normally would anything from our shoots.  While I am sure that the quality of the original camera played a role in the quality of the images, I was still impressed with how well they came out.

I will save you uploading all of the the full images as the JPGs are much too large to upload here.  Here are just a few sized samples:

You can download a full size sample here. (Approx 10MB)

Summary

I thought the pricing was reasonable and the quality exceeded expectations.  If the overall process could be sped up, that would be even better.  When reviewing the scanned images online the site itself was a little slow at times, but nothing too major.  I really have no complaints about the services Scan Cafe provided and have been quite satisfied.  In fact, the next time I locate some negatives I am not going to try it myself, but send them off to Scan Cafe.

But you don’t have to take my word for it.  There are pro photographers that have been using their service long before I have that vouch for them as well.