Average cost of medium/large format scans

My local custom lab charges $35 to scan a medium or large format

transparency for a 16x20 print. Their rates go by the size of the

print, presumably because they are scanning at higher resolution for

larger prints. Is this the the "usual and customary" charge for

scanning? I'm a little suspicious because they charge $15 to burn a CD

with the file. That seems a bit high given the cost of the media and

drives.

Yeah, that's steep...unless it's a drum scan, and for 35 bones it had better be.

 

I've been using www.imagerylab.com for anything that doesn't just have to have a drum, or is beyond my Epson 1640. $8 for a brutally sharp 2,000 dpi Nikon 8000 scan from MF, which absolutely destroys the ancient Kodak system and hold it's own against the Flextight. My last batch of chromes had strong blacks, yet no banding, so they must have fixed that problem the 8000 is known for. Strongly recommended for high quality slide scans from MF.

 

Not sure if they do 4x5, but for that format you might look into an Epson 2450.

As far as I know it is a drum scan. They are a good lab and do good work (I've had 6x7 and 4x5 prints made with internegs in the past). It just seems that they are holding prices constant for things that should be seeing prices come down. THe most glaring example is the $15.00 charge to write a file to a CD.

For a drum scan this is not an unreasonable charge.

Check the prices at westcoastimaging.com and

nancyscans.com which are two labs which are frequently

recommended.

Just a couple years ago a 100mb drum scan was usually about $100. So prices have been coming down. One problem service bureaus had was that their main scanning business the previous decade was from the deeper pockets of commercial work and not fine art or consumer inputs. They have thus been resistant to reduce prices since businesses were more interested in service and quality and not low price sensitive. The problem was aggravated mid 90s when Kodak began providing PhotoCD's at a price well below what they could drop prices for so a two tier pricing structure evolved. In the recent years, consumer film scanners, dot matrix printers, digital cameras have contributed to an overall explosion of digital photography from consumer through commercial work so service bureaus needed to adjust their market plans in order to leverage the broader scope of the low end market. Currently it is still too expensive to get a 5000+ dpi drum scan from 6x6+ MF/LF but there will be a day in the not too distant future that too will change. -David

My "lab" is charging $45 for a 200MB crossfield RGB drum scan. If you go larger it's .50 per MB. Are they overpricing?

 

Any chance we will see an affordable (under $1500) desktop drum scanner in the next few years?

Forgot to say that the above price is a 50% off special price.