Should You Take Your 35mm Slides To Costco, Walgreens or Affordable Scanning?

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 Walgreens 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 the slides and disk up last week, 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, we can't help thinking that there are an awful lot of VERY disappointed Costco customers out there this week. We thought that Walgreens 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 Affordable Scanning, 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.)

The Walgreen's scan is flat and not sharp at all and the Costco scan has an awful reddish tint to it. The Affordable scan is sharp, bright and color correct.

Why would anyone be satisfied with either the Costco or the Walgreen's scan of this mountain scene? The Affordable scan is so vibrant in color and sharpness. The Walgreen's scan is flat and colorless. The Costco scan is so awfully red tinted and unnatural.