ScanCafe update
All my my pictures (slides and negatives) were returned yesterday in their original packaging. In fact it was so original that I got back pages from the Sunnyvale Yellow Pages I had used for filler. Those are some well-traveled pages.
I also got 4 DVDs full of pictures. My initial impressions are that the scans are about as good as can be expected. I've done some scans myself with a high-end scanner, so I know that film grain is going to show no matter what, and it does. But the color and cropping and orientation seem OK at first glance. All the pictures look good when shown as the equivalent of 4x6 on the screen, but start to look worse full-size on 24" monitor. But I expect the original pictures wouldn't have tolerated that much blow-up either, especially after the negatives sat in a drawer for 20+ years.
Some of the pictures have worse exposure or focus than I would have expected, and I'm going to have to go back and look at the originals to see if they had the same problem. Given that most of the images were in sharp focus with good exposure, I bet most of the problem is with the originals, but I'm not positive yet.
My biggest complaint is with the organizing of the pictures. I had given them to them in little bins marked "A1", "A2", etc., where each was a particular roll of film. I had hoped I would be able to copy all the files from A* into a single directory, and have all of the pictures in order. But noooo...the filenames are in random order between the different directories. Also, within a particular directory, I don't think they paid attention to the exposure numbers on the film strips, so the strips (of 5-7 negatives) are out of order with each other. This is going to require a lot of hand rearranging and script-writing to renumber the filenames.
But, all in all, it's still a lot better than I would have done myself, and it's DONE, and for not much money.
I also got 4 DVDs full of pictures. My initial impressions are that the scans are about as good as can be expected. I've done some scans myself with a high-end scanner, so I know that film grain is going to show no matter what, and it does. But the color and cropping and orientation seem OK at first glance. All the pictures look good when shown as the equivalent of 4x6 on the screen, but start to look worse full-size on 24" monitor. But I expect the original pictures wouldn't have tolerated that much blow-up either, especially after the negatives sat in a drawer for 20+ years.
Some of the pictures have worse exposure or focus than I would have expected, and I'm going to have to go back and look at the originals to see if they had the same problem. Given that most of the images were in sharp focus with good exposure, I bet most of the problem is with the originals, but I'm not positive yet.
My biggest complaint is with the organizing of the pictures. I had given them to them in little bins marked "A1", "A2", etc., where each was a particular roll of film. I had hoped I would be able to copy all the files from A* into a single directory, and have all of the pictures in order. But noooo...the filenames are in random order between the different directories. Also, within a particular directory, I don't think they paid attention to the exposure numbers on the film strips, so the strips (of 5-7 negatives) are out of order with each other. This is going to require a lot of hand rearranging and script-writing to renumber the filenames.
But, all in all, it's still a lot better than I would have done myself, and it's DONE, and for not much money.