film scanning via India

[RedHot]

I saw an ad in a magazine today for a company, I will not mention the name as I don't want to give them a "plug", that will ship your negatives, slides, or prints to "highly trained technicians" in India who will do a premium high scan of 3000dpi and restore your images.

And the price? Just 19 cents for a negative, 27 cents for a slide, and 35 cents for prints. Yes let's send EVERYTHING to India and have workers do it for $2 a day and send it back to the US. Talk about someone wanting to make money off of cheap overseas labor.

And the very last line of this ad, that was written to make it seem like an article, was a quote from a customer that roughly said: "..and now I have my collection wonderfully digitally archived!". Which is such an oxymoron because we all know that a digital form is at this time in no way archived! The slides and negatives they'd be sending to India for you are in an archival form already, just not in a digital form!

This reminds me of a speaker I saw about 10 years ago who spoke about his company that would take an older engineering/surveying map/plan and scan it into a digital file. He would then email/FTP it to India where the technicians there would redraw everything on the sheet in Autocad from scratch all for about $5 or $10. It would typically cost an employer $200 or more for someone in an engineering office to redraw a paper map from scratch in autocad.

The thing this guy didn't make clear, and cause confusion, was that the map was to be redrawn from scratch in Autocad instead of having the scanned image converted into an autocad drawing.

So if you don't want to do it yourself and services cost too much in the US, just ship it to Asia, right?? No.>:(

[rhys]

I saw an ad in a magazine today for a company, I will not mention the name as I don't want to give them a "plug", that will ship your negatives, slides, or prints to "highly trained technicians" in India who will do a premium high scan of 3000dpi and restore your images.

And the price? Just 19 cents for a negative, 27 cents for a slide, and 35 cents for prints. Yes let's send EVERYTHING to India and have workers do it for $2 a day and send it back to the US. Talk about someone wanting to make money off of cheap overseas labor.

And the very last line of this ad, that was written to make it seem like an article, was a quote from a customer that roughly said: "..and now I have my collection wonderfully digitally archived!". Which is such an oxymoron because we all know that a digital form is at this time in no way archived! The slides and negatives they'd be sending to India for you are in an archival form already, just not in a digital form!

This reminds me of a speaker I saw about 10 years ago who spoke about his company that would take an older engineering/surveying map/plan and scan it into a digital file. He would then email/FTP it to India where the technicians there would redraw everything on the sheet in Autocad from scratch all for about $5 or $10. It would typically cost an employer $200 or more for someone in an engineering office to redraw a paper map from scratch in autocad.

The thing this guy didn't make clear, and cause confusion, was that the map was to be redrawn from scratch in Autocad instead of having the scanned image converted into an autocad drawing.

So if you don't want to do it yourself and services cost too much in the US, just ship it to Asia, right?? No.>:(

Hmm... Send irreplaceable archives to India where some hired monkey gets footprints on them, rolls them into a reefer and smokes them? Or send them via al-Quaida airlines in the hope they will arrive safely? OK I might sound a bit harsh there but I would never send something valuable or irreplaceable to India or via the post.

Now let's look at the costs...

To get a single negative scanned - 19 cents. To post it to India - God alone knows how much. To insure it in case it's destroyed or lost or stolen... Sounds cheaper just to scan it yourself or to hire a local guy to do the scanning.

[strmrdr]

Hmm... Send irreplaceable archives to India where some hired monkey gets footprints on them, rolls them into a reefer and smokes them? Or send them via al-Quaida airlines in the hope they will arrive safely? OK I might sound a bit harsh there but I would never send something valuable or irreplaceable to India or via the post.

Now let's look at the costs...

To get a single negative scanned - 19 cents. To post it to India - God alone knows how much. To insure it in case it's destroyed or lost or stolen... Sounds cheaper just to scan it yourself or to hire a local guy to do the scanning.

The ship it by airline as cargo in bulk.

The 19c covers shipping, You send them too the US office they bundle them and ship them too India then they are shipped back too them then too you.
The only shipping you pay for is the US shipping too and from the US office.
I looked into it, its cheaper than a good slide scanner to get all my slides done but I wont use it because I'm against outsourcing.

[strmrdr]

btw its actualy .24c for slides and .19 for negatives.
The best US price I could find was .45 neg. .59 slide.

[rhys]

A lot of people buy a film scanner on ebay and scan their negatives then sell it again on ebay. My mother-in-law has a nice flatbed scanner that can identify individual negatives and save the scans as individual images.

[Lightstream]

I like my Canon 8600F... those negatives/slides I have are irreplaceable: insurance be damned, there is no way they can bring it back.

The 8600F takes 12 frames at one go. Set FARE (automatic dust removal and whatnot) Medium, load the carrier, unsharp masking to taste (usually off, I USM shots myself), and the scanner takes care of everything. 2400dpi 12 frames can take something like 40 minutes, so I just disappear and do something else, leaving it to scan unattended.

Even if I only do one roll an evening (3 batches), that's a lot of scanning one can achieve in a month of spare time. The only time consuming part is loading the scanner. Once they've been digitized you can use your normal PP workflow to handle them as any ordinary JPEG. (sorry no RAW from scanners.. the RAWs are the plasticky things with sprocket holes you hold in your hands ;) )

[Glenn NK]

This all reminds me of an article I read in a computer mag last winter.

Because of the rapidity of changes in computer technology, and file types, he made a good case that the best longterm storage media for photography might be prints (or slides).

Does anyone still use a 3 1/2 inch floppy, or a 5 1/4 inch floppy? I saved a number of Autocad drawings on 5 1/4" floppies barely ten years ago. What good are they now? And the word processor files I saved on 5 1/4 floppies in the mid eighties can't be read by any current word processor.

I don't worry too much about archiving hundreds (thousands) of digital files in twenty-five locations, because in 15 or 20 years, will we be using Photoshop and/or Lightroom? (insert your own program).

Anyone still use a Dual 1010? I used to - now where did I put it?:lol:

EDIT: after reading the post below, I realize I had typed 7 1/4" instead of 5 1/4" (the 7's are quite rare;)).

[rhys]

I used to use 120K 5.25" floppy disks. I used to buy them single-sided and punch them so that they were then double-sided.

I loved the 3.5" disk when that came out at 720K then 1.44mb. I even had the 120MB LS-120 disks. They were great. Now though, floppy disks are too diabolically slow to use and hold too little. USB memory sticks are a much better solution even than CDs and DVDs although they are still a little pricey.

I remember in my computer class at the Institute of Higher Education that I attended when I studied computing, my lecturer showing the class an 8 inch floppy disk that she used to use when she was working as a programmer.

[ssim]

I have the Nikon Coolscan ED9000 scanner which is a sweet unit and does a terrific job. I got this one because it will handle up to 6x7 negatives of which I have around 75,000 which I want to scan some of the best ones.

And the price? Just 19 cents for a negative, 27 cents for a slide, and 35 cents for prints. Yes let's send EVERYTHING to India and have workers do it for $2 a day and send it back to the US. Talk about someone wanting to make money off of cheap overseas labor.

I would think that they will probably do a significant amount of business. The price is certainly right and when it comes time to saving money or buying the same thing domestically but at a much higher rate the vast majority of consumers will opt for the price option. The current trend of having so many jobs done overseas has to give us pause to think about how we are pricing ourselves out of jobs here.

[rhys]

It was the fact that everything was being contracted out, overseas that really killed programming for me. I remember applying for one job and finding out accidentally that the reason I did not get the job was that they decided to hire somebody in Ukraine to do it. That was actually against the law but none of the UK governmental bodies that exist to ensure this kind of thing doesn't happen could be bothered even to reply to my letters. I decided then and there to try to get into a role that could not possibly be exported. That meant services and hence I started my computer repair business. Now I'm in photography (which is more fun).

[StewartR]

I decided then and there to try to get into a role that could not possibly be exported. That meant services and hence I started my computer repair business. Now I'm in photography (which is more fun).That's smart, up to a point...

If you visit a hotel or restaurant or coffee shop in any city in the UK these days, chances are you'll be served by someone who is polite, hardworking, ... and almost certainly from Eastern Europe. It's a simple fact of life that there are plenty of people "out there" beyond our borders who are willing and able to do many jobs for a fraction of the wage that many westerners seem to think is theirs by right. And plenty of them are sufficiently motivated to go where the jobs are too.

Computer repair might go the same way; why should I pay £x for you to fix my PC when the guy over there will do it for £x/2?.

Now, what about photography? Why is that not vulnerable to low-wage competition?

[rhys]

That's smart, up to a point...

If you visit a hotel or restaurant or coffee shop in any city in the UK these days, chances are you'll be served by someone who is polite, hardworking, ... and almost certainly from Eastern Europe. It's a simple fact of life that there are plenty of people "out there" beyond our borders who are willing and able to do many jobs for a fraction of the wage that many westerners seem to think is theirs by right. And plenty of them are sufficiently motivated to go where the jobs are too.

Computer repair might go the same way; why should I pay £x for you to fix my PC when the guy over there will do it for £x/2?.

Now, what about photography? Why is that not vulnerable to low-wage competition?

It is vulnerable to low-wage competition but the door price (cost of gear) is high enough that Johnny Foreigner cannot just hop on a plane to come and do it. If they can afford the gear already then they already have a market where they are.

There are companies that pay peanuts to hired monkeys and call it photography. Companies such as Lifetouch, Olan Mills etc.