Time and Energy
| Task | Time (in minutes) | |
| Cleaning: it takes time to remove the dirt and dust likely accumulated over time to ensure a clean, sharp scan | 0.5 | |
| Scanning: includes time to correctly position and do the actual scan, with extra time factored in for re-dos. | 2 - 3 | |
| Editing: time used for image repair, including dust and red eye removal, cropping and color correction. | 4 - 6 | |
| That's an average of 8 minutes per photo! | Total: 6.5 - 9.5 | |
We believe preserving your memories digitally should be a priority and if you decide to not use ScanDigital or a service to help you with this task, doing it yourself is an option. However, before undertaking such as yourself, you should understand what you're getting yourself into. For even the most tech savvy people, scanning requires tremendous amounts of time, money and energy to ensure reasonable quality.
Scanning and editing take a lot of time. After you've spent time researching the equipment and editing software to purchase and have taught yourself how to use them properly, each individual photo will take several minutes to process. If you're like the average consumer, you have thousands of photos stored in boxes in your basement, so you can imagine how painstakingly time consuming this task will be if you do it yourself. For the average person, scanning your entire collection of photos will take every weekend for the next year. Certainly you have better things to do!
Money
Your time is valuable, so you will also need to factor in the time you will spending to process your material into your overall costs. As seen above, an endless amount of time is needed to take on this project- every weekend for the next year to be exact. If planning to convert your old photos to digital format yourself, there will be significant upfront costs to purchase the required equipment. Different equipment is needed for different formats of photographic material. Prints, negatives and slides cannot all be processed the same way. You will need two types of scanners for about a combined $2,400. Then you will need the proper editing software, which will run you about $140 additionally. It adds up pretty quickly. ScanDigital uses only the best equipment available for converting your old memories to digital format. If you'd like our recommendation for what to purchase, take a look.
Quality
Even if you are willing to give up your weekends for the next year and invest nearly $3,000 required for equipment, you must also account for the quality of your efforts. Your ability to scan and edit are crucial to the final results. Our highly skilled team at ScanDigital is comprised only of top professionals. We capture the sharpest scan possible and edit images better than the original, every time. We offer the highest quality available and guarantee you'll be satisfied with the results.