Pixmonix vs ScanCafe: The Final Verdict
It has only been about a month since I placed my first order with Pixmonix to have about 60 of my old slides scanned and every time I look at the pictures I’m pleasantly surprised with the quality of the scans, and with the end result. This is the third, and final, post about my experiences with Pixmonix and ScanCafe and I hope to shed some light on the differences between the two scanning services.
In the second part of the series, I had just placed my order with Pixmonix after reviewing the preview scans online. Now that I have had the disc and files in hand for a couple of weeks, I can tell you that the scans from Pixmonix are way better than the ones from ScanCafe. The colors are more vibrant and true to what I saw in my slides and detail has been preserved in both the shadows and highlights; some of my slides from ScanCafe lost detail in those areas.
And not only was the turn around time much faster, even with ground shipping, but Pixmonix also went an extra step and provided me with 4 sizes of .jpegs for each file: JPEG_Full, JPEG_SS, JPEG_Email, and JPEG_Thumbs. That service wasn’t even an option with ScanCafe. Check out the following size comparison:
The average file sizes are listed below:
- JPEG_Full file sizes range from 6-9 MB
- JPEG_SS file sizes are anywhere from 200 to 500 KB
- JPEG_Email sizes range 70 - 170 KB
- JPEG_Thumbs are 3 - 5 KB in size.
- TIFF files are a whopping 36 MB (!!)
I’m very happy with the quality of the scans from Pixmonix as well as the service I received along the way. Steve was very helpful and quickly corrected the 15 free scans that weren’t originally applied to my order. Actually, he emailed me and told me about the correction before I even noticed.
I will definitely be using Pixmonix again and I would highly recommend them to anyone looking to have any old slides, negatives, or prints scanned. If you have any questions or need some clarification on anything, be sure to leave me a comment and I’ll get back with you.
