It’s funny how quickly a commonplace technology can quickly and irrevocably pass into obscurity and obsolescence. Consider the 45 record adaptor, rotary-dial telephone, stamps that have to be licked…and photographic slides and negatives. Most of us, with the possible exception of those who’ve burnt all familial bridges, have boxloads of the damn things. Whether neatly categorized and stored in Carousel trays or haphazardly heaped in random envelopes and piles, their bulk is as much mental as it is physical. We can’t discard the images knowing they contain rich troves of blackmail material (evidence of regrettable clothes and hairstyles). Oh yeah, and treasured memories. And unless we suddenly find ourselves in 1977 again, nobody’s coming over to see a slide show. Our non-digital photographs never see the light of day except when we haul them out to clean the closet or move house. Something must be done!

Digital images are eminently versatile. You can share them on Facebook,  blog ‘em, get ‘em made into T-shirts, caption them into LOLcats. Even technophobic septuagenarians knows that scanning those oldies to bring the memories into the digital age is a no-brainer. The problem: how to efficiently and cost-effectively do so.

A desktop scanner is right out of the question; it’s slow and fussy and the quality’s dodgy. You could buy a dedicated slide scanner, but they’re slow and/or costly, and you’re still handcuffed to your desk for months (do the math). And then you have to organise the scans one by one. That’s not efficient.

Plenty of local labs offer image scanning. Tell your wallet to open wide and say “Aaaigh!” The price for a quality scan starts at around $2 per image. That’s not cost-effective. You could dispense with immigration formalities and quietly import low-cost laborers to be handcuffed to your desk in your stead, but that raises difficult ethical and karmic challenges.

Enter scancafe.com. It’s black-box solution to the problem: ye olde analogue images go in one end; neatly-organised, affordable, high-quality scans come out the other.

It’s better than hauling your stash to a local lab. For one thing, the service costs a lot less. Scanning a 35mm negative or slide costs 29¢ at 3,000 dpi—a resolution suitable for printing good quality enlargements as large as you could’ve had from the original slide or neg. Want ‘em scanned at four kilodots per inch rather than three? That’s nine cents more.

Unlike most local labs, ScanCafe accepts just about any film size, including those long-discontinued ones with pics of grandma and grandpa and mom and dad when they were little. For under a buck an image, they’ll process non-35mm images from Instamatics, medium format, newspaper clippings, probably even those “I’m gonna getchya with the Kodak Disc!” negatives from the 1980s. You can even send in your slides still in their Carousel trays, if you like. Every image is cleaned to remove dust and lint before scanning; more extensive image restoration is available at extra cost for those whose religious beliefs preclude using Photoshop.

The biggest advantage to ScanCafe is their pleasing business model. You estimate how many of each kind of image you’re sending in and prepay half (the site figures out the amount for you). They scan everything you send, then you log into the site and peruse your images. You uncheck those you don’t want, then pay only for those images you decide to keep. You can reject up to half the number of images you sent in and pay $0.00 for them. This is really ingenious; it cuts out most of the manual hassle: you needn’t laboriously pore over the images before sending them in. Just a quick preview suffices to discard the blank frames, out-of-focus and head-cut-off shots and the like.

You can pre-sort the images into categories; I used gallon zipper-lock plastic bags labeled such as “House,” “Scenery,” and “Grandpa.” ScanCafe maintains these categorisation for you, placing the scans into folders named for your categories. You can move images into different folders and otherwise rearrange them during the perusal.

While it’s s a clever, well-debugged system it’s s a little slow to react to commands. When you mark an image for deletion or drag it to another folder there’s a several-second delay while the command is carried out. It grows annoying if your order is large, but it’s hardly the end of the world, given the immense net time savings compared to manual image sorting and self-scanning. You don’t have to do all the sorting in one session; you can come back to it any time within the viewing period and pick up where you left off. And ScanCafe’s privacy policy makes it clear I’ll retain sole control over who sees my evidence that the ’70s was the decade that taste forgot.

Once you’ve deleted the scans you don’t want and shuffled the categories to your liking—you’ve got a couple of weeks, and can ask for more—you finalise your order and pay the adjusted total. Shortly thereafter you receive your choice of CDs, DVDs or hard drive with your high-resolution scans.

ScanCafe sends your originals in a separate box, because their scanning facility is in India. Hang on; they’re going to send my irreplaceable images halfway round the world and back? Well, yes. That’s a bit worrisome, but the California company’s thoughtfully set up this part of the process, too.

ScanCafe’s completely candid about where your images are being handled (bonus points for not pulling any Mumbai-accented “Hello, my name is Joe Smith and I’m speaking to you from the call centre in Eudapimp, Idaho” shenanigans). The shipping is handled in one seamless and well-insured go: when you make the 50 percent prepayment, you’re issued a UPS shipping label. Pack up your images in accord with the clear instructions on the site, hand them in at a UPS desk, and from then on you can track them right from the scancafe.com site.

I received an e-mail at each critical stage—when the images were received in California, when they arrived at the scanning facility, when the scanning began and was complete, etc. And there are apparently real people behind the scenes; I’d sent in some uncut rolls of developed film, and they sent me an e-mail asking permission to cut these into the standard strips of five images for compatibility with their scanners. No problem, but I appreciate their having asked first, and when I replied to that effect, I got back a personal “Thanks, we always ask first and we’re making good progress on your order” note.

ScanCafe also get a pass for violating the “never UPS to Canada” rule, because they take on all the brokerage fees. That’s fine; I’m happy as long as I haven’t got to pay them.

The site itself offers an extremely polished user interface; everything’s logically placed for easy navigation. The writing is clear and straightforward; there’s no handwaving or smokeblowing. There’s an extensive, clearly-written FAQ, and a link to the company President’s blog.

The price schedule is easy to understand, as are the various choices and decisions; one-click help is readily but unobtrusively available next to just about every term that could conceivably be unfamiliar. The site is effectively implemented as a tool: pick it up and use it to do the job at hand; it works for you, not against you. Want to send mom and dad a prepaid box to send in their slides and negatives? That’s an option.

The whole process is very flexibly configurable according to your needs and preferences. They’ve even worked out how to do promotions and discounts properly: make them worth going in after, vary them, and run them often. This week it might be 5¢ off each scan. In two weeks it might be 10 percent off the whole order. In another fortnight it might be $100 worth of free scanning. If the current promotion doesn’t suit you, wait a week or two and there’ll be another. They’re offered to everyone, not just a select few who’ve signed up.

All in all, the whole experience is everything it ought to be: easy, cost-effective, reasonably fast, configurable to suit individual needs, with a high-quality result. I was so pleased with my first order of over a thousand images from the 1930s to 1960s in multiple formats that I’ve just sent them my second order of about 300 images from the ’70s and ’80s.

Ease of navigation

No complaints. There’s a great deal of information here, but it’s well sorted and organised. The answer to your whatever question is readily accessible and you don’t feel cowed by all those other answers to questions you haven’t yet asked. The order process is simple, streamlined, flexible, and clear. It’s difficult or impossible to mess up and have to start over.

Look and feel

The ordering site is polished, professional, straightforward, fast, up-to-date, and thoughtfully designed. The image-manipulation part of the site is logically designed but somewhat poky and occasionally a little temperamental, a tolerable nuisance which nevertheless drags down the score in this category.

Personalization

Well balanced. Yes, they will send you a relative lot of email, but it’s all relevant and worthwhile: either they’re giving you an update on your order or they’re letting you know of the latest promotion. Don’t want to hear about promotions? They comply with an unsubscribe order on the first go.

Shopping Cart

Problem-free and transparent. If you err, the site makes it easy to go back and fix it without upsetting the whole process.

Mobile app: N/A

Overall

This is definitely the way to get an otherwise daunting job done with minimal hassle and expense. The only problem they haven’t thought of and solved for you is how to assemble a kinetic sculpture using a slide projector, twenty 45 record adaptors and a rotary phone.