Things to Remember When You Compare Old Photo Prices
With The Competition

NOTE: There is more than one company, that we know of, that is shipping customer's slides and photos overseas for processing. One company ships your family photos to India to take advantage of low wages there. But they hide that little fact from you. (They don't want you to KNOW what they are doing because most people would not knowingly agree to sending their photo collection thousands of miles away to a third world country no matter how much money they save. If the price is unbelievably low, your job is probably going to India. )

 

Read the fine print from their "Terms and Conditions" that you have to agree to when you sign up for an "account" very carefully. If they say they are a "global service company" or if they offer "services in multiple countries" or if they have "processing centers inside and outside the United States" and if they reserve the right to use any one of their processing centers, then you can bet that there is a really good chance that your precious slides and photos are being shipped OUT of the USA for processing because there is no way they could do it in the USA even if they only paid their employees minimum wage. Besides that, they reserve the right to change all their terms and conditions whenever they want and you, as an account holder, agree to accept all the new terms.

 

If you have to sign up for an "Account", be very careful to read those terms and conditions. An "Account" is a real tip-off that there may be some terms and conditions in the "fine print" that you are not going to like if you take the time to read them.

 

Also remember that when you send your photos or slides to these "Overseas" companies, 8,600 miles away from California, that you are losing any rights to your property when they ship your slides or photos once again by a third party shipping company from their USA location, to outside of the USA. If they go out of business, the slides and photos are no longer considered your property by the shipping company. They will be left in India or Costa Rica or who knows where and might be lost to your family forever. The shipping company that they use has no idea that you are the original owner of the photos and you have relinquished any claim to ownership and can't even file a claim. Is it really worth the chance? Shipping to a company in the USA and having control over the carrier should mean a lot when you are dealing with valuable family heirlooms.

 

Please be assured that your slides and photos and other materials will never leave Old Photo's premises until we return them to you. All our employees are 100% USA citizens and not low wage people or children working in who knows what kind of conditions.

 

Be wary of companies that offer unbelievably low pricing. It is just not possible to offer the services that Old Photo does at a lower rate and still remain in business unless you are using very low wage laborers. We can't believe that some of our newer competitors can stay in business very long if they try to cut prices to draw away business from more established companies like Old Photo. Think about where your photos and slides will be when these "newbies" go out of business.

 

Our standard price includes: individualized, non-automated color restoration to faded slides and photos, where possible,  by a  PhotoShop® expert and corrections for color balance, exposure, saturation, orientation, and precision cropping. Prices also cover all disks needed to compile the included DVD playable slide show, PC slide show and to store the images. There are NO HIDDEN charges! Take this into consideration when comparing prices. We know you are looking for the best value for your money and you can't beat our expert service & price combination. All work is performed in the USA by US citizens. Your precious memories will be safe with us. We are small enough to care about you as a person and give you individual attention, yet large enough to give you many years of expert technical experience and the professional services that you need to convert your entire slide and photo collection to digital.

 

35mm Slides and Photo Scanning Costs See our scanning estimator page.

What to look for when doing scanning price comparisons:

We can't spend a lot of our time researching all our competition's pricing and keeping a price comparison webpage up to date, so, in fairness to our competition, and certainly to our disadvantage, we will not be directly comparing our prices to their prices. But, we do recommend that you do several price/service comparisons before you decide which service to use. If you do, you will see that your best price and service value is going to be with Old Photo.  In order to help you do an educated search for the best place to have your slides scanned,  here are some guidelines for you to keep in mind when you see a website that is offering what seems to have unbelievably low prices or that claims to give more services than Old Photo.:

• Do they offer to do ten free sample scans so that you can see the quality of their work before you commit to a large order? Old Photo strongly recommends that you get the free sample scans from any company you plan on sending your project to, EVEN US.

• If their prices are unbelievably low, maybe it would be a good idea to wonder why. We at Old Photo have trimmed our costs and overhead down to a bare minimum. Anyone that can promise more than we do at a similar price, should be looked at very closely before you trust your family picture collection to them.

• You may see a Google ad that says "35 cents Each Slide, Negative, No added cost, etc.". When you click on their link, you will see that they do offer this pricing but it does not include any Photoshop work to enhance your scans and make them look like the original photo. If you want that level of service, then the cost is 59 cents per scan. Old Photo's price for this same service is 39 cents per scan.

• You may see a Google ad  that says "Slide Scanning - 29 cents". Then, when you get to their website, you will see that this is for a very basic scan that you are really not going to want. They are just sucking you into their site by stating a lowball price that you are not going to pay anyway and they know it. Here at Old Photo, we tell you our prices right away. Our prices are very straightforward and we do not try to deceive you at all. Our business is based on trust and not deception. You trust us with your family heirloom photos and we trust that you will like our service so much that you will pay us for our work.

• Any websites that make unsubstantiated and specious claims, should be judged accordingly. Let the buyer beware of such claims. Here would be some claims that you should really question: "More people trust MyGreatBusiness! to digitize their photos than any other service." "All of our employees are college educated." (Sheesh. One would think that someone with a college education could get a better paying job than this or there must be some reason why they can't.) "The Leading 35mm Slide Scanning and Photo Scanning Service." "We are the premier provider of slide and film scanning services". How do they prove that? How does anyone disprove that? We can tell you this: we don't know how many customers they have and we know for sure that they don't know how many customers we have. So where do they get the nerve to make such claims? Do you really want to trust your photo collection to people that make claims such as these? These and claims similar to this are specious claims.

• Any company that uses the ROC, GEM and any other batch applied  filter on your images, could be doing you a disservice and not a service. Automatic filters can't come close to having a Photoshop expert (such as Old Photo uses) color enhance your images

• Get their Free Sample Scans and see what your scans are going to look like before you make the mistake of sending them your whole slide or picture collection.

• We feel that, if you shop around and compare Old Photo to our competition fairly, we will come out on top and we would love to do business with you.

We think most people realize that, when you do a Google search for a term such as "35mm slide", the first couple of "finds" at the top of the page are simply advertisements. My browser has these ads over a blue background. Google calls them "Sponsored Links. Also, over on the Right side of your window you will find a whole column of ads relating to this search term.

These advertisers have to pay a lot of money to get these listings.

To put your ad near the top position on a Google search for a term such as "35mm slide" for all possible impressions, Google estimates "a budget of $60.00 PER DAY and a max Cost Per Click of $5.63." In other words, every time someone clicks on their ad, it could be costing them $5.63. That is expensive especially when you have to realize that not every person that clicks on your ad is going to be purchasing your service.

So where does the money come from to pay for these ads? It comes from the customers that they are able to acquire from these ads. They suck you in with lowball prices and then they keep adding on services until their prices are well over Old Photos prices. Why can't people just be up front and honest like Old Photo? We are at our absolute 'break even and make a little money to have a reason to stay in business' price point. We can't imagine how anyone could undercut our prices and stay in business very long. Stick with Old Photo because we are going to be here long after those that take a loss to get your business. Where are your slides or photos going to be when they go under? Make sure they are with Old Photo.