Toronto Photography Meetup Group

My parents have asked me to look into digitizing their old photo prints. They don't still have the negatives for the vast majority, so it would be scanning the actual 4x6 prints.

I'm aware of a number of online services (ie: scancafe) where you ship them a box of photos and they scan them. The cost seems to work out to about $0.30/image. Our estimation (count one volume, multiply by total volume) has us at roughly 2000 photos, for a rough cost of $600, which seemed high.

We talked to a number of other family friends, and it turns out that most of them also have large numbers of old 4x6 prints that they want to scan, so we decided to look into buying a scanner that can feed in 4x6 prints, and splitting the price. We have free labour to run it, but doing it by hand with a flatbed scanner is just too painstaking, so we want something that will feed a stack of the prints.

Looking around online, I can find a lot of scanners with a auto feeder for film strips, and ones with paper feeders, however most of these seem to rotate the sheet around a roller, and I don't think that most of these would handle a photo print well. Having trouble finding one with a photo print feeder though.

Any one run into something similar, and recommend a machine? If you've tried scanning using a standard document feeder, did it work out for you?

I can't find any reliable consumer grade photo scanner with feeder. I believe HP and Fujitsu make them, but you might run the risk of jamming your precious photos.

Here's another service you can consider:
http://www.scanmyphotos.com/

This one seems more affordable: Check the user comments in this place - http://forums.steves-digicams.com/image ... eeder.html

hmm looks like scanmyphotos is a bit cheaper, but doesn't include shipping the photos, which would add to the cost.

I'd still prefer to keep it direct if possible.
The HP mentioned in that thread looks like a possibilty, but doesn't seem to be available new.

I might have to look at a low end commercial model, work out if there are enough of us to be worth getting one then putting it on ebay once we're finished.

if you find a HP model you like, I could try and find a good price for you.