Come at the question from the opposite viewpoint - How much would *you* be
willing to pay for a high quality scan? Probably no more than the market
rate!
Now take a look in the small ads in AP, see how what the going rate is.
Granted, the going rate is for a plain vanilla scan which is very
significantly below what the 4000ED can do (By comparison, Peak charges
GBP40 for a 100MB scan, decreasing to GBP20 for 25+ but I suspect you would
have difficulty competing with Peak'sestablished market position).
How much time are you willing to devote to receiving the originals, banking
the cheques, running the scans, burning the CDs and packing/shipping the
results? Is the extra time it takes to do a full-up scan justified by the
higher price you can get compared to the market price?
Perhaps you get my drift...
Depending on your answers, I might just do the same with my 4000ED for 10%
less (see, no barriers to entry to this market!), having established that I
can do 'acceptable' scans from old Kodachromes in about 2 minutes each - but
with no editing/cropping/selective correction at all.
BTW if you *are* thinking of paying that much for a 4000ED, you might want
to think about the 5000ED for 10-15% less. Or if you are thinking of
getting the slide loader, be sure that it will work with the wide variety of
slide mounts you are going to be feeding through it.
Lest that sounds too 'negative' let me make clear that the first scan I ran
through a 4000ED was a full-on 67MB scan of a slide which had already been
scanned by Peak (CD Archive, 14MB file, GBP 22.50 per CD at time of
processing). The difference in saturation and shadow detail was astounding.
HTH!
Piers
-----Original Message-----
From: olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of Simon Worby
Sent: 17 September 2004 19:53
To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [OM] slightly OT - UK - film scanning - business proposition?
The last bit sounds like one of those horrible spam messages, doesn't it?
It isn't, though, I promise, so read on!
I'm seriously considering buying a high quality film scanner in the £1000
bracket (Nikon 4000 ED, to be precise). But I can't really justify it since
I don't yet have any slides to scan, though I'm intending to move over to
slides-only photography hence the need. My father has loads of old
Kodachrome slides from the 70's (OM-1), mostly of India, and he's willing to
chip in something. The plan is to scan them in and then send of a CD to get
the best ones printed for display.
What do folk think about the possibility of marketing film scanning to try
to offset some of the cost of the equipment, and perhaps offer the service
of professional printing (open an account with Peak Imaging (for example))
and reselling the printing side of it as an addition? Is there a market for
this sort of thing? Would it be easy to promote (without spending money on
advertising)? I'm not really looking into turning it into a business -- I
think very quickly it would become even more boring than what I currently do
for a living! I'm not even particularly looking for profit. More a way of
justifying the expenditure to 'er indoors...
Comments anyone?
Simon
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