Standard 35mm Negatives
- 2000-4000 DPI on professional scanners
- Ordered, titled and numbered
- 3 level human eye quality control
- Dust removal, cleaning & orientation
Standard 35mm Slides
- 2000-4000 dpi on professional scanners
- Unpack & repack of carousels
- Dust removal via cloth, brush & compressed air
- Ordered, titled & numbered
Med. & Lg. Format
$3.99
Starting @ per negative
- Individually cleaned & scanned
- 2000-4000 dpi on professional scanners
- Returned as is or in organized photo boxes
- Ordered, titled and numbered
A $40 service fee applies to all orders. This service fee provides for safe handling procedures including: intake, item coding, physical & digital storage, quality checks by senior technicians and packaging. Have a large slide scanning project?
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– Linda T., Lincoln, MA.
“To start a project to convert my dad’s slides to digital, I brought over a first set of 250. Pleasant, helpful, professional service. The day before my requested pickup date, they called and said they were ready! The best part was giving my dad the usb stick and then the whole family watched a digital slide show with 3 generations laughing over the crazy clothes and enjoying the special occasion photos and all the memories. It is very important to share these family memories and histories. These Ektachrome and Kodachrome slides had super clarity and color… thanks to Everpresent’s careful cleaning, very few dust specks. I just got the next set of slides out of the closet to have converted at EverPresent! My dad is looking forward to seeing and sharing those from his deployment during the Korean War in around 1954.”
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Top 10 Reasons Why Families Choose Us
- Convenience: Home pickups, over 40 local stores, and easy shipping kits
- Trust: Over 40 million memories preserved, 30+ years experience, 60+ expert technicians
- Organization: Everything preserved as is, in order, with labeled folders, captions and metadata
- Communication: We offer a dedicated point of contact for no charge for orders of all sizes to help you talk through the many decisions that arise when scanning a photo collection
- Comprehensive: We scan standard 35mm slides, 3D stereo slides, 127 super slides, 126 slides, 110 slides, 120 slides and more.
- Respect: No upfront payments and no rushed decisions. And we don’t ask you to disassemble carousels or binders and get things out of order.
- Time Efficient: Over 90% of orders completed in under one month
- Affordable: Our prices are competitive and we include much, much more for your dollar.
- Fair: We don’t cut off tapes at the two hour mark. We don’t send back non-easy, broken, or moldy items. And short, damaged or blank tapes are proactively discounted.
- Quality: We use the best scanners. For all the technical, nitty gritty details, click here:
- Security: Alarmed, sprinklered, camera-monitored lab during transfer. 180-days of free backup cloud storage afterward (in addition to your USB or DVD). Advanced barcode tracking and email technology to keep you updated along the way.
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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Are there any kinds of slides that you cannot digitize?
Not that we are aware of. 35mm slides represent ~95% of our scanning requests, but we can handle all of the other formats as well. Even if slides are in bad shape, the worst case scenario is that we remove the film positives from the slide mounts and scan the raw film. It costs more, but can be done if absolutely necessary. This happens in well less than 1% of the slides we encounter.
Do I get my originals back?
Yes. We return your slides to you after we scan them. Our default is to return them as is in their original boxes or carousels. However, if you prefer to have them returned in a more space efficient fashion, please let us know.
How do I decide which slides to get scanned?
There’s good news and bad news when it comes to slide selection. The good news is that slides were the dominion of good photographers and were relatively costly to make, so people tended to avoid unnecessary slide creation, and there wasn’t the duplicate phenomenon we encountered later with print photos. That said, there are still plenty of slides people may prefer not to scan, and it ultimately is a personal question whether the time spent to declutter slides is worth it. If you do take on this challenge, some equipment will help with selection before scanning. For 35mm slides, you might find a PanaVue device online for under $100 that allows you to insert slides into a magnifying device. Alternatively, old 35mm slide projectors can be found that will let you put enlargements on your wall. For non-standard slides, the options are less convenient, but a light table can help you view batches of slides conveniently. They’ll be small, but at least you won’t be holding them up to your overhead light in the kitchen.
Can I share scanned slides online? How will they look?
Of course! We do not put any sort of copyright on our slide scans. You own them and they are yours to share as you please, be it on websites, Instagram, in articles you are publishing, in email attachments or anywhere else. Our higher resolution slide scanning at 2000-4000 DPI is generally overkill for online viewing and will allow for excellent display, especially on phones and mobile applications. We deliver our slide scans as .jpg files, which work fine on the web and are generally easiest for uploading and downloading. But some web developers prefer the .png technology for website content. If that’s your preference, we offer this feature – so just let us know when you submit your order online or visit our stores and we can export a set of .png type files for you. Lastly, you should know that the data appended to your files will flow through to most online photo-sharing applications. For example, if you choose to have us append metadata for face tags or dates or whatnot, you should be able to sort lists online quickly according to this data. Some sites will even allow geo-tags to populate your images on maps!
Why do non-35mm slide scan services cost more?
As 35mm slides were by far the most common slide produced, the converters and scanners developed for digitizing slides are more advanced and bring inherent efficiency. And, orders tend to be larger, which creates its own efficiency in our process. We pass this along to our clients in the form of lower pricing for 35mm slide conversion. All of the other slide formats must be transferred on slower equipment.
What file type do I get with my slide scans?
When we transfer slides to digital, our default is .JPG files at 2,000 DPI. We also offer 4,000 DPI and beyond. Upgrades to .TIFF files are available and are preferred by some professional photographers, editors and institutional archivists. While this service is more profitable for EverPresent, we don’t push it for most clients, as it’s expensive and can bog down computers and software platforms not geared for archives of this size or sophistication. Keep in mind that we can also transfer slides to DVD or CD.
Do you make my slide scans look better than my originals?
Yes. As discussed earlier our default process addresses dust and surface blemishes. But after we do the initial scan, we do additional optimizations. Some are about image integrity, such as assuring clean crops and correct orientation. But we also do light image optimizations, with exposure fixing being the most applicable for slides. We also keep a lookout for common color issues, with shift in the magenta over time being the most common resolution issue with slides. For discerning clients, we offer advanced repair, retouching and restoration services. If you’d like to learn more, please ask your consultant about this option.
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 digitized slides 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 and 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 scan a digital image:
- 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.
- 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:
- 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_1”…”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 in your digital scans.
- Advanced Organizing: Our slides to digital 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.
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