Do It Yourself 35mm Slide Scanning?

Yes, you can do it yourself but will doing it yourself save you money?

I can see doing it yourself if you are going to save a lot of money, but you are not saving a lot of money in the long run. Either you have only a few slides or photos to scan and it won't be worth it for you to buy good equipment so you will buy cheap, inferior equipment and you will end up with inferior images, or you have a lot of slides and photos and you will spend a lot of time doing it yourself and then you will be stuck with some expensive equipment that you will never use again. Is that saving money?

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Just a note: Whatever you do, don't waste your money on a Brookstone iConvert Scanner or any of the other brands out there that are obviously the same thing but just a different case. What an absolute piece of junk but that is more the rule than the exception to the rule. You just will not get a quality maching for converting your slides if you don't pay for it. If the price is cheap, the scanner is cheap.

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I can do plumbing and electrical projects but I am better off paying an expert to do it for me. These people know what they are doing and I know it is going to be done right. I also look at things like this and I know that my time is worth something to me. How much is your time worth?

 

35mm Slides and Photo Scanning Costs 39 cents per scan $20 minimum scanning charge. 4" x 6" Prints made from the scans are 49 cents each. See our scanning estimator page.

 

Yes, you can do it yourself but, do you have the time to spend on such a big project and are you going to be satisfied with the results of doing it yourself?

We just had a phone call, tonight at 10:30 pm. A man and his brother had taken on the job of transferring the family collection of 5000+ slides. They had purchased a Nikon CoolScan something or other and they were having troubles with the images being grainy. He wanted advice on how to use his scanner. They had to get the 5000+ slides scanned for a party that was happening in less than a month. Too bad he didn't read this page before he went out and purchased that scanner. I can't believe that people have so little to do in their lives that they think they are actually going to save money by doing a job like this by themselves. I would be willing to bet $100 that they come no where near finishing their slide scanning job in two months and I know for sure they will have no other life than scanning and computer work for that whole two months. But that is them; what about you?

An unedited 35mm slide scan:

Same scan edited by an expert

Do you have a lot of time on your hands? Do you love playing with computers and troubleshooting computer/scanner/imaging problems? Then you are going to have a lot of fun with your scanning project. When you are done with the scanning, then you can become very familiar with some type of photo editing software. If you can edit your scans to be even close to what our PhotoShop® experts can do (see images above), then, you very likely can do a good job with your "do it yourself slide scanning project." We do this kind of work on every scan. We can do it very fast and you can't. If you decide to do it yourself, believe me, you are going to spend hours and days and weeks and possibly months attempting to do what we will do for you for just pennies a slide.  But cheer up; after all this experience maybe, after you are done with all your 'on the job training,' you could apply for a job with Old Photo.

What is the motive for wanting to do this tedious and boring job yourself?

• You can probably change the oil in your car but you, most likely, have someone else do it for you.
• You could probably make your own bread yourself but it is easier to just buy it.

Why would you pay someone to do these other things for you, which are much easier to do than doing a good job of transferring your family heirloom slides to digital, and then want to try to do the work of scanning your slides to digital format yourself? Especially when our prices are so low?

35mm Slide Scanning Equipment

35mm Slide scanning equipment is a whole different story. If you think you are going to be able to get acceptable scans of your 35mm slides with a scanner under $1000, you are going to be in for an unpleasant surprise. Make sure you are able to return the scanner when you see how disappointing the results are. Click here to see an example of an Old Photo scan compared to a Pacific Image Prime Film 35mm film scanner that is much more expensive than you are going to want to pay and the results are still disappointing to say the least. Once you buy a specialty slide scanner, what are you going to do with it once you are finished with your project?

Faded Pictures and Faded 35mm Slides

Look at some examples of faded pictures and see if you have the ability to color correct these pictures. The Old-Photo Scanning Service  will do it for you, no extra cost.

There is also the question of whether you want to spend all the time necessary to do this job. You will be lucky to scan more than one slide per 2-3 minutes at high resolution. That's 3.5 hours, minimum, to scan 100 slides.  And that doesn't include Photoshop® tweaking. Don't you have something better to do with your time? This is not a fun job. Are you really saving money?

Let the expert scanning service technicians at Old Photo do the work for you and do it right. Our pricing is very reasonable and you can be doing what you really like to do and are good at.

3D Stereo Slides

3D stereo slides are another problem. We had to design and manufacturer special adapters for our scanning equipment so as to be able to scan the 3D Stereo Slides. We can guarantee that you are not going to be able to do this type of scanning with the results that we will give you.

We do not remove the film or damage the 3D stereo slide film holder. These are specialty scans and the scanning process cannot be automated and each 3D stereo slide has to be hand fed and necessarily are subject to a higher scanning charge. We have the lowest prices and the best service for 3D Stereo slide scanning you are going to find anywhere. Click here to see our page on 3D Stereo Slide Scanning.