Photo scanning business

[mills]

I've been thinking of starting kind of a side business of scanning people's old photos and maybe touching them up (adjusting tint, levels, etc. nothing crazy). What do you all think of this? Also, what kind of price range would you be willing to pay for something like this? Maybe, if somebody is willing we could do a free trial run to see how long it would take me to turn it around. Or, I might just keep it on the forum and take cigars in exchange. Any ideas/advice are appreciated. Thanks!

[hex1848]

I've been wanting to do something like this for a bunch of pictures from back in the college days. I probably have 200-300 photos I would like to eventually have scanned. What would say 100 photo's run?

[BigMacFU]

Hope you have more time than a side business in mind. One, most places charge a lot of money for this, especially if people don't have the negatives (fingerprints don't look good on scanned photos and thus need to be cleaned). Plus, without an industrial drum scanner, the time it takes to scan something so that it's actually scalable to be blown up and used in a larger frame from 3x4 to 17x30 takes forever. Drum scanners cost A LOT, we're talking bank loan type costs. On a regular high quality home scanner, scanning just a few photos all on the glass at once at 1440 DPI or higher takes FOR-EV-ER!!!!!!!!

But, if you're just talking about 300 DPI, people don't care if there are fingerprint smudges, etc... Then it really doesn't take much time at all. But you definitely can't charge much for a product like that.

Not trying to sound discouraging, but I've been the archiver of my family's photos. Takes a heck of a lot of time and it's repetitive and boring, I'd want someone to pay me a lot, but then I'd have to turn out good quality.

[HersheyWalker]

Although BigMac's post is meant to deter you from moving forward, you can look at it as a testament to the need of quality photo enhancement.

BigMac, can't the photo smudge problem be circumvented by providing the disclaimer, "Photos must be cleaned before scanning!"?

Looking forward to seeing some examples of your work.

[mills]

BigMacFu, I appreciate your advice. I was thinking more of a low end thing. Maybe I'm wrong, but I was thinking that there would be a significant enough amount of people out there with old photos who would be willing to spend something like 20-30 bucks for 100 photos scanned around 400 dpi, which is enough for a quality 8x10.

I'm interested in hearing from some other people. Hex, maybe we can work out some sort of trial run.