I just realized that I never posted a final review of my ScanCafe experience. Well, after nearly three months of waiting, I received a nice little box from ScanCafe with a fancy DVD (full-size case with custom art) and my original photos in the shoddy packaging I had originally sent them in.

After dropping all the photos from the DVD into Lightroom, it’s safe to say that ScanCafe did a stellar job scanning and cleaning these 28 year old snapshots. The color restoration is better than the test scans I tried on my Epson scanner (which took nearly 20 minutes a photo) and the level of grain is as good (or bad) as one would expect from aging photos.
I printed up one of the photos as a 4″x6″ on my HP inkjet printer and it came out a touch soft, but way better than the original photo. The only problem I have is on my end. The original photographs that my mother took three decades ago were printed on what looks like 3.25″x4.25″ Kodak paper with rounded corners. Trying to crop these shots for modern paper is a bear.

Loving the results I got from this batch, I decided to take the plunge and sent a ton of negatives over for scanning. The only problem I had was that I couldn’t tell some of the black and white negatives from the color negatives. ScanCafe charges a premium for B&W scanning and I didn’t want to gyp them. I called to find out what I should do, and the customer service rep told me to just guess and that it would all be averaged out in the end.
I also mentioned some of my complaints, the biggest being the long transit time between shipping from their SF office to India. The guy on the other end explained that shipping to India includes time that the package sits at the office and is opened and inspected, which takes longer than transit. However, they have no way to note that. I understood, but mentioned that some customers (including myself) might worry that the package is lost. I mean three weeks to ship to India is crazy. He said they were working on updating the system.

This time, transit from SF to India only took a few time. The package is now sitting in queue waiting for scanning. I’m much happier knowing it’s there and hope for great results.

So, nearly two months after I placed my order, ScanCafe sent me the email I had been waiting for. My photos were ready for review. Just about 170 snapshots dating back to 1979 were available online for me to peruse, reject, and order. Just as Pop Photo stated in their review a few months back, the scans were excellent and the restoration quality is top notch. Sure, the quality on some is grainy and far from crisp, but the source material wasn’t exactly pro-shot.

In the end, I rejected seven photos (you can reject up to 50% of the order), paid for the rest and checked out. The only problem was that whenever I tried to share the photos with anyone (including myself), I would get a failure notice. For nearly a week, no one could see the photos, and they didn’t appear for me when I logged in. After a few calls to ScanCafe, I got through to Matt who personally walked through the problem, gave me his email so I could show him what was wrong, and fixed it within 24-hours. Again, great support if you can get someone on the phone.

I also mentioned that it sucked that it took over a month for the photos to arrive in India for scanning. ScanCafe informed me that it didn’t actually take that long, rather the unboxing, unloading, sorting, and queuing process was included in the whole delivery time. I told them that it would be nice if they could at least let us know when the package arrived in India so we don’t have to worry that our precious shots are lost. They said they were trying to work it out. Again, great support.

Within an hour I had reviewed everything and placed my order. ScanCafe is now burning the high res photos to disc and mailing them back to me with the original photos. Let’s see how long this takes.

Around the same time, my mom gave me a few photo albums of me as a baby that was in pretty sad shape. The shots were yellow, the pages tathered. I put them through my scanner, using the color restore setting and the results weren’t much better than the negatives. Stray hairs, color streaking, grain–it was sad.

So I did some searching and stumbled across ScanCafe, a photo digitizing center in San Francisco that outsources photo and negative scanning duties to India. They got rave reviews in Pop Photo and the prices are extremely reasonable.

I decided to give them a shot. First the baby photos, which ScanCafe claims they can scan at 600 dpi and color restore. I carefully removed the photos from the decades old album, destroying the book in the process and tearing a few photos. I taped them as best as I could, packaged the whole thing and prepped it for shipment to SF.

ScanCafe asks that you pay for half the processing in advance. Out of 166 photos, I ended up paying $32 to scan the first batch at 27 cents a scan. After they all get scanned, the photos will be placed online where I can select the which ones I want. I can also reject up to 50 percent of them, and just pay for the ones I keep. Obviously, this is a major body of baby photos and I doubt I’m going to be rejecting too many.

The first big hiccup I faced was when I placed the order. I purchased them the Sunday before New Years and for some reason their pop-up that prints the UPS form wouldn’t come up. It took a week to get someone to answer the phone at ScanCafe. When they answered, they were super friendly and fixed the glitch. However, I had now lost close to two weeks from the order date of Dec. 30. After an endless UPS ground transport from NJ to San Francisco, the package got their on Jan. 21 and has been in transit to their outsourcing plant since then.

According to the Web site, the photos will be scanned and online by March 19, two and a half months after placing the order. Here’s hoping the scans are awesome, because this is quite a wait. I’ll keep everyone updated on the process as it happens. If these come out well, I’m going to send all my negatives.