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The Technical Fine Print

There are certain folks who like to read the fine print before they make an important decision. This section is for you. It’s not a light read, but will give you a look under the hood at how the slide digitizing service process works. Our philosophy has always been simple: only offer a service if we can do it better and/or cheaper than the alternatives. If you can’t look in the mirror and meet that standard with a straight face, then don’t offer it at all.

Quality Factor #1 – Preparing for the Slide Scanning Process

All things being equal, slides tend to hold up better than other forms of old analog prints. Print photos tend to fade, deteriorate, and crease easily. Negatives tend to curl. Slides, between their sturdy film stock, cardboard mounts and closed containers, are most likely to be in pristine condition for the digitizing process. The exception is the surface of the film, where the slide emulsion tends to attract dust and a light film. For this reason, cleaning the slides before scanning is paramount. We use a combination of microfiber cloth and compressed air to clean up the slides before we scan them. This assures that we don’t scan the bad stuff, and that our scanners stay clean so that your digital versions look great.

Quality Factor #2 – High End Scanners

We have a very high bar for our slide scanners. 35mm and other slide formats have a significant inherent level of detail, and it is critical to have a strong imaging element to get the full sharpness and color depth. This requires multiple different types of equipment for the different sorts of slides we see.

Second, let’s talk about the nuances of the scanners and the situations we need to accommodate when we transfer slides to digital:

• Flatbed Slide Scanners: Flatbed scanners are the go-to solution for most of the non-standard slide formats we receive. We have a series of custom mounts, some of which we maintain via 3D printing, to allow us to get the perfect distance from the scanner glass for less common slides. We are using high-end Epson scanners for this purpose where we can go to 4,000 DPI and beyond if necessary. If you send us glass mounted slides, 3D stereo slides or similar, we are likely using our flatbed scanners. When we transfer a slide to digital format, we will also use flatbed scanners for the most common format, 35mm scans, when the slide mounts are damaged, curled or when the film positives must be removed from the mounts to get a good scan. These scanners cost ~$4,000 a piece.
• Overhead Scanners: Overhead scanners refer to a sophisticated camera element that images the slides from above. It is relatively uncommon for us to use this scanning rig for slides, but there are exceptions, most commonly oversized transparencies. We built this rig in-house using Nikon imagine elements and it costs ~$20,000.
• Tray Scanners: A tray scanner lets you put a series of a few dozen slides into a tray, which are then auto-fed into a high-end imaging element. The best machines for purpose were the converters made by Nikon. Fortunately, we have a huge supply of these devices and know how to maintain them, relying on 3D printing and expert handling. These machines are best leveraged for scanning 35mm slides in standard cardboard mounts. One of our tray feeding slide stations costs ~$15,000.

Quality Factor #3 – Organized Digital Archives

We scan almost 100,000 images every week, and if we sent clients disorganized archives, we’d be exchanging one problem for another. When we transfer slides to digital, including when we transfer slides to DVD, we keep them organized. That starts, critically, with not asking you to remove your slides from their current housing. If you have slides in small boxes, carousels, binders or something else, we take them as is so that we can keep them in order. That’s the foundation of organization, with other options including:

Advanced Organizing: Our slide scanning service offers various advanced organizing options for your scanned slides, including highlighting, date-tagging, topic-tagging, geo-tagging, and face-tagging. These services are designed to make it easy to find photos you want in larger scanned archives. This is generally appropriate for archives of 3,000 or more images, and your consultant at EverPresent will make recommendations. You need not be prepared for this upfront.

Folders: All groupings that we receive get their own folders, whether it’s a carousel or a binder, or groups that you put together manually. We scan every slide in order, and then number the slide scans sequentially. So, for example, if you give us a slide box labeled “European Vacation 1975” there will be a folder titled similarly and each scan will be labeled “European Vacation 1975_01”…” European Vacation 1975_2”, etc. making it easy for you to know exactly where your media files are located.

Handwriting and Notes: If someone took the time to write notes on your slides, we are happy to preserve that work in digital format. We have the ability to manually transcribe written notes into the caption metadata of your digital scans.