We Work With Every Format
We digitize standard 35mm negatives, 110 negatives, 126 negatives, APS canisters, glass plate negatives, medium format negatives and large format negatives – all in house.
You do not have to organize your negatives before sending them to us. We take your negatives in their original boxes, sleeves or envelopes – however you have them – and return them the same way.
Negative Scanning: Pricing for All Formats
Standard 35mm Negatives
- 2000-4000 DPI on professional scanners
- Ordered, titled and numbered
- 3 level human eye quality control
- Dust removal, cleaning & orientation
Non-Standard Negatives
$1.39
starting at per negative
- 2000-4000 dpi on professional scanners
- 126 negative, 127 negative, 110 negative
- 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 negative scanning project?
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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
- Advanced options including retouching, color correction, digital organizing with metadata 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.
- 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
Why do all of the non-35mm negative formats cost more?
35mm slides were most common, so much more efficient negative scanning technology was developed. The other formats require slower technology, and because most of them are much larger, the scanning element needs to spend much more time on the scan. Sometimes a large format negative required 20 times more scanner bed time to get a good image vs. 35mm negative.
When were negatives invented?
Surprisingly enough, the technology for your color 35mm negatives was around long before it was introduced in 1936 as a photography film product for the average consumer. It was still expensive in its earliest stages and didn’t take over the market completely until the 1970s when it edged out black and white photography film, which shifted toward fine art and photojournalism almost exclusively. Most people tend to associate 35mm negatives as the final frontier before switching to digital cameras and that’s mostly right, but they had a long lifespan. Your 35mm negatives, could be as much as 40 years old, and even older if your parents were up on the latest photo technology in the 1930s.
What do I do if my film is still in the canister and unexposed?
We would love to say, “Absolutely! Send us your unexposed film!” but we only digitize fully exposed rolls or strips of 35mm film. The good news is that there are still companies that develop 35mm film negatives, like The Darkroom in California, a specialty shop primarily focused on 35mm negative production or your local Walgreens or CVS.
Are my negatives 35mm?
If you discover a box of negatives with a variety of sizes, because there are a TON of other negative formats (like 110, 126 and disc film), the best way to know is by the size. 35mm negatives are named because the strip is 35mms tall, and because nobody measures in millimeters, that’s 1.38″ tall. It will also have multiple frames with images and perforations on BOTH edges.
How many 35mm negatives are on a roll?
This depends on the kind of 35mm film you have. Most rolls of film had the room for either 24 or 36 exposures. Usually it will say right on the contact sheet, envelope or 35mm film canister.
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 video tape transfer 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 Negatives for Scanning
Negatives tend to come to us in sleeves of some sort that often have very small handwriting and some level of stickiness to them. The first part of our negatives scanning process is to create a unique folder for each natural grouping of negatives, and transcribe your written labels into the folders so that we preserve your organization system. Then, we clean the negatives themselves with compressed air and/or microfiber cloths. Lastly, we evaluate the negatives to select the appropriate scanner technology.
Quality Factor #2 – Professional Scanners and Equipment
The various forms of negatives require many different scanning technologies. We evaluate every collection of negatives carefully to determine the right answer to get high quality scans while protecting the originals from any damage, fraying or tearing.
- Flatbed Slide Scanners: Flatbed scanners are the go-to machine for glass plate negatives and, because we can put light pressure on top of the scanner glass, for situations where 35mm negatives have become extremely curled. In these situations we use a special glass that eliminates a distortion called Newton rings. Flatbed scanning is a slower process, but allows us the flexibility to deal with challenging negatives at a high level of quality.
- Overhead Scanners: We recently built an overhead scanning rig that is yielding higher quality scans for medium and large format negatives at an affordable price. Overhead scanners refer to a premium camera element that images the negatives from above. We built this rig in-house using Nikon imagine elements and it costs ~$20,000.
- Feed Scanners: Premium film feed scanners are the best options for 35mm negatives and APS canisters. A feed uses a custom tray which allows a single strip of negatives to be inserted and then scanned image-by-image. 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 Nikon scanners do a wonderful job on color saturation, removing artifacts and produce a super sharp image at 4,000 DPI. These scanning stations cost ~$15,000.
Quality Factor #3 – Image Retouching
Generally speaking, if our clients have kept their 35mm negatives over their prints and have them in exquisite condition, they are true photo enthusiasts who want the best out of their negative scans. Fortunately, we have wonderful options for these clients. Our baseline services include 2,000 DPI scanning, dust removal, correct orientation and cropping, light optimization mainly focused on exposure and white balance, and organized folders with sequential labeling of the .jpg files. Discerning clients often ask us for the following upgrades:
- Enhanced scanning resolution to 4,000 DPI
- .TIFF files for enhanced professional editing capabilities
- Advanced organizing with metadata tags for dates, geography, topics or faces
- Image retouching focusing primarily on color correction. We have an affordable service at $0.40/photo where we use our judgement, or a custom service for $95/hour where we work with clients to select the most special images to do high-end retouching work.
More From Our Happy Negative Scanning Clients
“I have a number of large-format glass plate negatives that date from 1900-1910. I had difficulty finding anyone who was willing to take on the project to scan the plates. Everpresent accepted the job, provided high quality raw files, and carefully returned the negatives to me. An all-around fine experience for their communications, customer service, and technical expertise. Thank you for saving the images.” – Sac.
