Review of Scanmyphotos service
I used scanmyphotos.com to digitize about 6,000 pictures that were ten to
twenty years old.
Mostly ok service. I only list the negatives so you know what to expect:
- The quality is passable, but a lot of color subtlelies are lost. Sometimes the digitized pictures look like black and white. Very often the color balance
has changed between periphery and center in such a way that Photoshop cannot do anything to restore the original balance of colors.
- The physical pictures come back grouped in a different way. The order is
roughly the same, but the rubber bands group them in different groups. So it
took three full days to reconstruct the original albums.
- The files are big, which would make you think you now have high-resolution
pictures on your computer, but each and every picture is slightly blurred.
If you display them as small images, you don't notice. Enlarge them the way
you would normally enlarge a high-resolution picture, and you'll notice.
My guess is that something happens when the picture is fed to the scanner:
speed does not often equate to accuracy. Check this example (the original physical picture looks perfect).
The last point is the most annoying one. My $30 ten-year old home scanner does
a better job. They must be using a really lousy scanner.
Better than nothing, of course, but don't expect to throw away the originals:
the originals still look a lot (a lot) better.
For a hefty price, Scanmyphotos offers to improve the quality of the pictures.
I haven't tried that because the base price is already so steep, and i don't
think there is anything they can do to remove the "blur".
If you have the negatives of the pictures, for that price you might be better
off simply printing again those negatives on a photo developing website.
Most of them include a DVD with the digital files.
This is guaranteed to give you the best result.
Piero Scaruffi, 2009
