Should You Take Your 35mm Slides To Costco or
Affordable Scanning Services LLC?

NOTE: There are more image comparisons below. Click here.

We go to Costco at least once a week. It is a great place for buying bulk food, TVs and other Electronics and toilet paper is their biggest seller and their Hot Dogs and rotisserie chicken are just delicious and a great deal. Their return policy is better than any other place where we do business and they have an automatic extended warranty on TVs. Costco just is not a good place to take your slides to have them scanned, if you care in the least about what your final images are going to look like. Costco had a special on digitizing slides, photos and movies and vhs tapes, last month. We thought it would be interesting to take the same slides that we tested Walgreen's with, and have them scan these same slides. Took about four weeks for them to turn around a minimal order because they ship them off somewhere and then they have to be shipped back again to the local store.

When we picked them up we couldn't believe the huge bin with "done scan jobs" that they had in the photo department. We asked about that bin and the kid said that it was that full because of their special sale last month. After seeing what they did with our test scans, I can't help thinking that there are an awful lot of VERY disappointed Costco customers out there this week. We thought that Walgreen's did a horrible job of scanning slides but Costco is SO much worse. If you could settle for this type of poor results, we would say that you would probably be happy with using the "Only good enough for a doorstop" scanners and doing the poor scanning yourself. If we didn't think better of Costco, we would say that this was the equipment that they were using with the slide scanning they did for us. We can't think of any other reason why their scans are so terrible.

Costco is a good warehouse store and also an adequate place to get your photo prints made but, Costco is NOT a competent slide scanning operation. Besides doing a completely inadequate job of scanning slides, they are farming out your slides to some third party, which, at any time in the future, could be located anywhere in the world, to do the work. Costco is merely taking your order. They are shipping your slides off to someone else to do the work. Among other things, this is not good because you lose possession of your family heirlooms completely. You have no idea where your slides are at or who is working on them. When you take or ship them to Old-Photo.com, they stay at our offices until we are finished with your project. There is no shipping to a mass scanning operation in India or some other foreign country as some other scanning companies do. (We are not saying that Costco does this, or even Walgreen's, but they do farm the work out to subcontractors.)

Don't just take our word for our tests at Costco and Walgreen's. We offer to do a Free sample scan of TEN of your slides. CLICK HERE. We usually turn this around within a few days. Send us ten of your slides and get your images back and THEN send the SAME ten slides to Costco or Walgreen's or any other service and get their free sample scans. Then compare the results. We look forward to the results because we know that you are going to be so much happier with what we can do for your slide collection than you will get from any other scanning company. Don't settle for poor, uncaring "workmanship".

(But, maybe you should take your slides to Walgreen's? Click here.)