There’s been a lot of buzz around the Net about a new scanning service called ScanCafe. They will scan your prints, negatives or slides (APS, 35mm and Medium Format) at very reasonable rates, far less expensive than anyone else. How can they do this?

The creators of ScanCafe are out of California, but the facility and all the work is done in India. They use high end Nikon scanners, process the files with Digital ICE to correct for dust and scratches, and even manually color correct the images. And after all that, you actually get to go online to review your order and delete any images you don’t want.

How cheap are they?

• $.19 for negatives at 3000 dpi (that’s a 13 MP file from 35mm)
• $.24 for slides at 3000 dpi
• $.27 for photos at 600 dpi

If you want a higher resolution scan it’s available for a small upcharge. You can also have the final images stored as TIFF files instead of JPG and/or stored directly to a USB hard drive and have it shipped back to you. Turnaround time for any scan job is 4-6 weeks.

This sounds like a heck of a deal, especially if you have years of accumulated negatives and slides you’d like to digitize. It works out to under $7.00 to scan a 36 exposure roll of film and less than $5.00 to scan a slide page full of 20 slides.

Using this service is certainly better than paying $1000+ for a high end scanner and spending all the time to do the scans. Some jobs are just better to farm out to someone else.