My father was a semi-professional photographer (i.e., people paid him, but he never made a profit -- fortunately it was only a hobby for him). When he died, he left behind hundreds and hundreds of boxes of slides. My sister and I were faced with the daunting task of feeding them one-by-one into a scanner, letting them rot, or paying a prohibitive amount to have someone else do it. I found Scancafe on the web and decided to send them one box of about 1200 slides.

It took quite a while for them to get to the order, but I was genuinely surprised by the quality of the results. The slides had been sitting in a damp environment for years -- in some cases, decades -- so the quality of the media was mixed at best. The scans were extraordinarily clear, and most of the dust and misting on the slides had been filtered out. The total cost was significantly less than $200.

Anyone who worries about using Indian outsourcing must still have a distorted view of the process. The shipping step is only slightly more involved (and therefore at risk) than shipping to say, North Dakota. Once it has arrived in India, most outsourcing is handled by college graduates or at least by well-educated and highly trained individuals. I'm as patriotic as the next guy, but I don't think it helps anyone in the United States by insisting on using Americans to perform menial tasks that someone in another country is enthusiastic about doing. Using a U.S. worker in that circumstance is simply taxing the customer to enable the U.S. worker avoid doing work at a higher skill level.

I plan on sending a few thousand more slides and negatives to Scancafe over the next week.