In a message dated 4/5/2000 Joey Richards <bigjoe@xxxxxxx> writes:
<< ...I do have access to a slide scanner (I believe it's actually one
of the photo CD scanners), but I don't have anywhere near the time it
would take to do a decent job at scanning a whole lot of slides, so I
would really
very much prefer to send them somewhere to get photo CDs made. >>
Good idea. Scanning is quite time consuming. Unless that Photo CD slide
scanner has an auto feeder...
<< What I'm concerned about is cost -- the cheapest place I've
looked at so far (and I haven't looked tremendously hard yet)
was Advanced Digital Imaging, who will do up to 100 scans
for $2/slide plus $10 for media -- since I would guess I'll
want on the order of 30 slides scanned (plus or minus a few,
depends on how things go on a light table), so that puts me
at around $70-$100 for the scanning. Does that seem like a
reasonable expenditure? Does anyone know of a cheaper
alternative? >>
This sounds too high to me. Last time I had a Photo CD done was about a
year ago and it was something like $15 for the disc and 90 cents an
image. This was at the local branch of the nation-wide chain (big bad)
Wolf Camera who sent the job out to Kodak.
<< Also, does anyone have experience getting inexpensive snapshot
quality prints from slides? My friends will probably want some copies
of some of my shots, and I doubt they'll want to pay for cibas of them.
:-) I've heard that Slideprinter does decent, inexpensive type R prints
-- anyone dealt with them? What qualifies as "inexpensive" in this
case? >>
I used to do all my prints on Ilfochrome (and before that Cibachrome)
paper. I still do for customers who demand that level of quality, but
inkjet prints are pretty darned good now. My best advice for low cost
prints from slides is to buy an Epson photo printer. If you never will
need prints (from the inkjet printer) larger than ~8x10 you can get away
with the smaller size model for less $. I think you can still get refurb
Photo 700s for less than $100.00. The latest generation has a supposed
10 year no fade print life span but there won't be any third party inks
for a while as Epson has made the ink cartridges "smart" by putting
memory chips in them which precludes easy refilling. I have an Epson
Photo EX (first generation) and 8x10s from scans I made on my Minolta
slide scanner are stunning. They have only gotten better now two
generations of design later. You can do 5x7s two-up per page printed and
your cost per page is pretty low...far less than Ilfochrome. You will
need a reasonable amount of computing horsepower to work on and print
the 15-30mb files you will find yourself working with but if you already
have that...put it to use. I still don't have a real good feel for cost
but I would estimate that each 8 1/2 x 11 page printed costs about $2.50
on high quality glossy photo paper. This does not account for wastage
but you can see that if you go four-up or two-up per page printed that
this is a pretty reasonable way to get snapshot prints.
Hope this helps.
Mike Veglia
Motor Sport Visions Photgraphy
www.motorsportvsions.com
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