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And we do the rest. Even better than Kodak - you don't even have to press the button.
Camera Electronic's shop in Murray Street is the home of the new Shoebox Service. Courtesy of some very clever machinery and programming , the staff at Murray Street can now turn your shoebox laibility into a digital asset.
The deal is this - you take in your shoebox or envelope of paper prints - and they must be between 5 cm x 5 cm and 20 cm x 30 cm - and must be unmounted with no backing paper - and the staff carefully scan them for you. It may be the work of minutes or hours but the important points to remember is that they are not your minutes and hours and you are not going to be asked to pay for the time taken.
You just deliver and then collect later.
The prints coming in cannot be on big album pages - the staff will not unmount them. Nor can they be in those big cardboard studio frames. You'll have to remove them from these supports yourself. You may find all sorts of things if you are prising pictures out of a historic photo album; tram tickets, silverfish, and pressed roses can be secreted behind them. And pencilled on the back may be dynamite family information. Prise carefully.
The scanning process won't deal with colour transparencies, negatives, glass plates, or other historic relics. If you have daguerreotypes you'll need to engage more specialist services...likewise if the original is bigger than 20 cm x 30 cm. Oil paintings are not possible, but then if you look at some of the people in my family pictures, none of them are oil paintings either.
The scanning process is surprisingly quick, but the computer processing provides unexpected benefits. Each image will have an internally-generated serial number, like ny digital image. The computer will make an exact copy of the original but will also generate a colour-corrected file at the same time. You get two at no extra charge. The colour correction may not be as intense or precise as the work you may undertake in your own editing program, but it is a pretty good start.
That's about it. If you know precisely how many pictures you have to scan you can pay for it up-front...or if you just hand over the entire shoebox the staff can tell you what the bill is in the end. The charges are based on the number of prints you put in to be scanned:
1 - 30 prints.....................................................................50 cents each
30 - 100 prints...............................................................40 cents each
100 plus prints................................................................30 cents each
You bring your own USB thumb drive memory stick in...and format it before you do so that we have a clean slate to write on...and we'll put your digital images onto it.
Then you can share them with the relatives by social media, drop boxes, or copied discs or drives when you get home.
Look upon it as a good opportunity to distribute family images around the world cheaply. Not every computer will crash and not every house will be subjected to fire or flood. And silverfish don't eat pixels.
