Today’s Post by Joe Farace
Like Jim Hayes, whose post Preserving Memories at Watkins Glen is worth a read, I have a lot of old images of cars and vintage motorsports action that were shot on 35mm slide film. There are some that I also shot on negative film too and scanning prints isn’t all that hard and many of us have some kind of desktop scanner, even it’s just an all-in-one sitting on a desk. The problem is that the scanning process, especially prints, while it can be relatively simple, becomes mind-numbing when you have to scan lots of pictures. And if you have slides it becomes even more painful.
So why not let somebody else do it? “Too expensive,” you say? For the person that has shoe boxes full of prints and slides I found the answer: ScanMyPhotos.com’s Prepaid Photo Scanning Box. For $235 they will scan up to 540 35mm slides into 2000dpi Standard quality JPEG files and for a few extra bucks ($9.95 or $15.95) put the resulting files on a DVD or thumb drive for viewing or editing on your computer. Need high-res? They will upgrade the scans to 2000 dpi Premium or 4000 dpi Standard or Premium scans; You can check their website for details, options and prices.
ScanMyPhotos also offers a Prepaid Box for scanning prints and I stuffed a box full of 650 photos (the box will hold up to 1800 prints depending on size) and has them scanned starting at 9¢ per scan and $170 per box. It took only a week from when I handed over my box at the post office until everything was returned. I was simply amazed by the quality of their print scans but even more so for the slides because many of them were not in very good condition.
My experience with ScanMyPhotos.com digitizing some of these old 1964 US Grand Prix slides that were shot using Perutz Color slide film, like the shot of Jack Brabham above, was impressive given the slide’s extremely faded and deteriorated condition. On the other hand some of my Kodak Ektachrome slides produced scans of images that looked like they were made yesterday.
ScanMyPhotos offers a wonderfully seamless process for digitizing images that have been dormant for many years and bringing them back to life. If you’ve got some old car slides, it’s time to bring them into the digital age.
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