Review: digmypics.com

DavidTO

I have tried the imminently cheap and fast scanmyphotos.com. They prove the rule about you can have good, fast or cheap, but not all three. They are fast, they are really cheap, but the quality suffers quite a bit, as they use document scanners to scan the photos. I was able to salvage it, but it took a bit of work.

This time around I decided to try digmypics.com. They are still inexpensive, but not as dirt cheap, and they are not as fast in turnaround. Hopefully they'll make up for that in quality.

So far the service is excellent, but not quick.

I sent in about 1000 photos and 500 slides on 3/12/09. They immediately sent me an email confirming receipt, but didn't start the process of scanning until nearly a month later on 4/6.

They provide a link to a page that keeps me updated on the status of the order. It was pretty boring for those 3-4 weeks, but now that they've started scanning I can actually see the work in progress. None of my images are corrected yet (included in the price) and some are still 4 to a scan, but it's cool to be able to see my images come up as they are scanned and to watch their progress. I'm really interested to see the slides once they come up.

Here's how the interface looks when I'm looking at the scans in progress:




And here's the order status page:




I'll be paying about $450 for this service. Last time with scanmyphotos I didn't have any slides, just prints, and it cost me about $.12 per print, plus the headache of fixing it.

ChrisJ

Thanks for the write-up, David. I'll be interested to hear about the final results. Thinking about this for our own (small) collection of slides, as well as a massive amount with the grandparents.

DavidTO

So, I got the order back, and it's all good. A lot more expensive than scanmyphotos, but better quality, too (although it took a lot longer). I had an opportunity to go through the scans and only pay for the ones I wanted.

They received them on 3/12, started scanning them on 4/7, were ready for review on 4/13, and shipped back to me on 4/14.

The biggest problem I had with scanmyphotos was severe purple fringing on some of the pics. They use a document scanner to keep costs down. I didn't have any of that with digmypics, as they use a regular flatbed scanner. They sent me 4 DVDs of TIFF files. Their process is two-step. They scan, and you can browse thumbnails in their un-corrected state (kind of slow and a PITA), and then they correct them and allow you to choose at that point which ones you want to pay for.

Here's some scans of prints:

This one I had to reduce the saturation of orange a bit.



This one is untouched.



Some slides:

Untouched.



Untouched.


The Ektachrome shots were not as good as the Kodachrome.


Some of the shots, just a few, were scanned too dark. It looked like they scanned trying to preserve the specular highlights, and the shot overall was too dark, so when they color corrected they ended up noisy. I didn't pay for most of those.

Here's an example of one of those: