The Digital Insider

ScanDigital has recently been working with many home organizers in the effort to help simplify the lives of their clients. Most of us have a system of storing our photos, slides and negatives that is somewhat similar; partially labeled and piled up in a closet somewhere. You may be the only one who is even able to decipher what is where. Now, with the help of ScanDigital you can store those images away neatly and have full access to your images on disc and online anywhere in the world (even organized into folders no less!).

When sending their collection of images and movies into ScanDigital, customers can label there rolls of film, carousels of slides and photo albums so that those same names and groupings appear when viewing them on your computer. ScanDigital’s scanning service means no more searching for twenty minutes to find those photographs from that great vacation 10 years ago. After sending them to ScanDigital they will be right at your fingertips, in high quality and digitally enhanced.

Along with the digitally organized images ScanDigital offers a digital photo frame that we will preload for the customer with their newly scanned images. These photo frames look great and are good space savers as you can rotate through many images on the same frame. The photo frames also make perfect gifts for loved ones.

I recently took a large bin of images out of my parent’s house and had them processed at our El Segundo facility. Because of our great turnaround time I was able to put the bin back before my mom even noticed it was missing. When I gave her the DVD loaded with all the images in labeled folders she was thrilled. It was great to see her reaction as she was amazed that our slide scanning and editing restored old slides that she was sure were faded beyond repair.  She had forgotten what was even in the bin in the first place and now she is enjoying her images and the bin has been put into storage!

If you were to start exploring the process of getting your images scanned into a digital format you would quickly see that most often the price to scan your photos is lower than the price to scan your slides and negatives. You are probably thinking, “Great! I will just send in my photos to be scanned and hold onto my negatives for safe-keeping.” Unfortunately for a small savings you would be keeping yourself from receiving the highest possible quality.

When scanning a print you are not working from the original material (negative) so essentially it is similar to making a copy of a copy. No matter how much we can do to adjust an image and while the results are often great, the results from scanning negatives or scanning slides almost always allows for a higher quality digital image. Because of how the slides and negatives are chemically processed it allows for a color quality that cannot be met on a standard photographic print.

Many consumers assume that because of the larger size of the prints they would create better digital images but with the high quality slide and negative scanners available that is just not the case. At ScanDigital we use Nikon scanners specifically designed for 35mm negative scanning and 35mm slide scanning. They are designed to scan at a very high dpi (we offer both 2000 dpi and 4000 dpi) with Digital Ice technology that automatically fixes very small scratches and any small dust particles that didn’t get completely removed during the slide and negative cleaning.

Slide scanning is a particularly important thing to do as the life of these slides is short-lived. Ektachrome slides for example can start deteriorating rapidly after just thirty years. Many customers express concern over shipping their irreplaceable slides across the country, believing that they are safer tucked away in the closet. Unfortunately by not preserving them digitally they are suffering irreparable damage as time goes on. ScanDigital is integrated with UPS for safe, secure and trackable shipping so don’t wait, save your precious memories by sending in your slides today!

At ScanDigital we have been very pleased with the great response we have had to our new film and video digitization services. We are proud to match our unrivaled quality in photo, slide and negative scanning with great video and film transfer. All video and film is transferred onto DVD which is easy to play in any standard player. The quality is excellent and it brings to life old memories that have been sitting in the back of your closet for years.

But what if you are looking for something more than just a DVD copy of your film or video? ScanDigital is happy to place your film and video avi files onto a hard drive. Once you have the full avi files you have the ability to do so much with your old film. There are a number of programs available to edit your home movies ranging from very basic programs like iMovie to professional level programs such as Final Cut Pro. From transitions and effects to adding music and chapter points, you are given the ability to personally customize your precious memories.

Special Events can be a great way to use your newly digitized film. Seamlessly integrate stills and video together for that big slide show, everyone will love what you have created for the big anniversary, rehearsal dinner, birthday etc. Also, you can now post your videos on the web. This will allow you to share your video with friends and family members all over the country, even all over the world. We have already heard stories of our customers sharing great moments with family members as they watch their old films and videos. And that is really what our process is all about, restoring precious memories so that it can bring family and friends together, no matter how far apart they are.

As some of you may know based on my bio at ScanDigital, I was a history major at Dartmouth and spent a number of years working in commercial real estate investment banking. So when the City of Pasadena called us to bid on a large historical architecture preservation project, I was particularly excited and honored. From a business perspective, this was obviously the type of call we love to receive. From a personal perspective, this type of project is particularly interesting to me. In my free time, I enjoy reading about architecture, both old and new.

For those of you who may not live in Southern California, Pasadena has one of the most active historic preservation societies in the country and the City is home to numerous famous residential and commercial properties. The bid process involved scanning a small group of slides and about a month ago ScanDigital was pleased to learn that we were awarded the project.

Our team recently begun scanning slides that document many of the historic properties in Pasadena. In addition to the slide scanning work we are performing, we will optimize the images digitally and, perhaps most importantly, we will be tagging the images with metadata in order to create a searchable database of images. The conversion of these slides to digital, to me, represents a new trend in historical preservation and archiving. Prior to our work scanning the slides they sat relatively useless in the basement of Pasadena’s permit office. Once the project is complete, residents of the city will be able to enjoy an easily search-able and usable version of these historic slides. It will be a great way for residents, old and new, to gain better access to their City’s history.

We look forward to working on projects like this as more and more cities across the country seek to move into the digital age, clear their offices of old materials and preserve this historic material for future generations. In times past, discovering historical information involved a lot of digging and searching, with new digital capabilities the future of history will be far more manageable and accessible. I am truly proud to be working on the Pasadena project and excited to see the end result of photographic database we will help them create.