Photo scanning for yourself?

Perhaps you should read this before you get started. We don't intend this to put you off but we would like you to know what you are committing to before you get started.

Scanning yourself might seem like a pretty good solution and we wish you well if you want to try it - this is exactly how we started so I can't say its the wrong thing to do.

However there are some things you might like to consider before you start.

Cost of the hardware and software.

I'm going to assume you are taking the better DIY approach but not the most expensive professional approach to the hardware. You can get a pretty good scanner for around £350 these days. I wouldn't recommend anything cheaper than this - especially if you intend to scan film. There are a lot of cheap scanners around at the moment and you will certainly get a scan from them but the quality will be low (some of them are just plain bad).

So let's say you get a good deal and you have your £350 scanner. How many scans do you need to do to get your money back?

Well lets use our cheaper options for scanning as an example.

To scan slides at 2400dpi would cost 35p per slide, or prints at 300dpi would be 12p.

This means you would have to scan at least 1000 slides or 2916 prints to cover the costs.

Just out of interest how much would it cost for professional equipmet? Well professional scanners start at around £1200. Of course these give you a much better scan than the cheaper equipment which is something that you are paying for from a professional scanning service.

To get your money back on these you have to scan 3429 slides or 10,000 prints.

But there are also software costs (unless you just want to use what came with the scanner). Then you have to have a computer in the first place capable of doing the scanning.

Perhaps the biggest cost though is time.

We recon it could take about 5 mins to get a scan from your £350 scanner. This is after a lot of practise mind you - it can take half a day or more to get used to just using the scanner and before you get the first good scan.

So how long to do 1000 scans (this is the lowest get your money back figure)?

5000 minutes works out at 83 and a bit hours. Lets say you do this at the weekend and what with other things going on you can only really commit 5 hours a day to doing it.

This means that it would take you 8 weekends (2 months of weekends) just to do your 1000 scans.

If you take just 1 minute more over each scan it will take you 100 hours or 10 weekends (that is working at this both Saturday and Sunday for 5 hours at a time. Do you really want to spend that long scanning?

So that's the best case what about the worst case of your professional scanner and 3429 slides to cover the cost?

Well this works out at 286 hours which is 29 weekends of 5 hours Saturday and Sunday. That is over six months without a break!

If you still want to do your own then we wish you well and recommend lots of magazine and coffee to see you through. However if getting us to do it doesn't seem such a bad idea after all then please contact us and let us know how we can help you.