Digital ICE®

You have a choice: deal with a company that will tell you the truth or deal with a company that may stretch the truth to get your business.

We pride ourselves on the quality of our final scans and the DVD and PC slide show that we provide to our customers. We even offer to scan ten of your slides or photos for free to show you the quality of our work. Amazing as it may seem, after seven years in business, we have never had an unhappy customer. We have very low, usually the lowest, prices, and always the best value and service combination you will find. We are just a little bit troubled when we see other companies purporting to offer services where we are suspicious that they possibly are not doing what they claim they are doing and, if they are, they may be providing a disservice rather than a service.

We are referring to those scanning companies that sell themselves as using the Digital ICE® filter on all of your slides when they, in fact, may not be doing that. Digital ICE® will work pretty good in many instances, although it does soften the image scan somewhat, and it takes almost twice the time and more, to use it on each scan. Digital ICE® requires the scanner to make two passes (rather than one) to map, identify, and eliminate imperfections. We don't think that there is any way that any other company is going to be using the Digital ICE® filter and be able to beat or even match our prices unless they are operating out of some third-world country and, possibly, paying sweatshop wages. There is also no way that they could possibly use the filter on just the slides that need it. That would involve viewing each slide with a magnifying glass before scanning. It would take too much extra time and time is money. We have cut our costs and time down to a minimum and that is why we can offer the pricing and services that we do. We do not make much money on each scan. Just imagine how fast you have to scan and then have the Photoshop® expert do color corrections and then compile a slide show and include all the needed disks for free and do it for only $.39 a scan, when you have over 400 slides.  It is almost unbelievable that we can do what we do at this price. It is mainly because of our expert Photoshop® Technicians, who can work their magic very quickly.

We don't mind competition, as a matter of fact, we are the competition, but we are somewhat handicapped when competing with those who, shall we say, might be stretching the truth when they say there are providing services, such as Digital ICE, that they are not and nobody can prove otherwise. Keep that in mind when you are shopping for the best value in 35mm slide scanning. You will not find anything dishonest at Old Photo. There are no hidden costs and we do not try to trick you into using our service by purporting to give you a service that you will not be able to tell if we did it or not. We have an ongoing project with Penn State University to scan their Anthopology slides. Do you need better results than they do? Maybe you do, so we recommend that everyone take advantage of our offer to scan ten of your slides for free so you can see for yourself.

It must be said that Digital ICE® only works if all the dirt is only on ONE SIDE of the film. If there is dirt on the other side, forget it. How many slides only have dirt on one side? Plus the dirt is not actually "removed." The pixels around the dirt are interpolated so as to be replaced by a sample of surrounding pixels. We have seen instances where the "eyes" of some people are mistaken for "dirt" and the ICE function has "fixed" the eyes by healing them SHUT so that the people looked like they didn't have any eyeballs at all. If you are scanning just a few slides at a time, you have time to check each scan to make sure there are no errors, such as this. In our case, we are scanning hundreds of slides at a time and something like this would not be caught until our Photoshop technicican gets the image. Even then this person may not realize that what they are seeing is not what was on the slide. Even if we could tell there was a problem, we would then have to go back and find the original slide (ever try to find one slide amid thousands of other slides?), rescan it, take that image and use it to replace the orginal bad image. This would take an amazing amount of time and cost. We can't afford to do that at our low prices and we are sure that nobody else in our price range can either.

Digital ICE® is not perfect. It can make your slide scanning worse than not using it if you have Kodachrome slide film. "Kodachrome slide film uses a unique dye that responds differently from other slide films. Due to the nature of the dye and the Kodachrome film development process, DIGITAL ICE® Technology can misinterpret certain image detail as a defect. An example of a general group of images that can be affected is underwater images due to the lack of content in the red channel. Similar images in which the green and blue channels overshadow the red data may present a problem." (From the Kodak / ASF website http://www.asf.com/support/
Scanners/FilmICEFAQs.shtml)

 

In order to not use the filter on these particular slides, the scanning company would have to sort through all the slides and only use the Digital ICE® on those slides that are NOT Kodachrome. Then the slides would be scanned out of order. There could be no batch scanning. An incredible amount of time would be involved doing this. Time is money in any business.