Scancafe.com review

Ordering/Shipping

For Christmas 2007 I got a scancafe.com gift card for $50. Excited to try out the new service, I selected 124, of my 1000+ Fujichrome Velvia 50 slides. I figured I would start out small seeing that this service ships your original slides to India for scanning. I created my account on December 28th and mailed in my slides with the shipping label that I printed from their website. To get the ball rolling I had to pay 50% of the cost up front before they processed my order. Total estimated cost was $29.76, after 15% off for a code I found online the total was $25.30. I paid this with my gift card. Unfortunately, you can't pay for shipping with your gift card, so I paid the $7.83 for shipping this 1lbs. package. I received order confirmation on 12/28/07 and my credit card was charged. When I entered the order it was estimated that the slides would be scanned and online for review in three weeks. The order was actually online for review on 2/21/08; about a month late.

Payment/Selection

When I first got the email I tried looking at my pictures online, and scancafe.com could not be reached. I tried again a few hours later and everything worked fine. Once your order is online you have to select the scans that you'd like to keep. With scancafe you can reject up to 50% of your order, and they will delete them and you don't have to pay for them. I chose to keep all my scans. This is where it got interesting. After selecting all of my scans I came to the payment screen. I tried to enter my gift card to pay for the remainder of my order and it completely didn't work in Firefox 2.0. I switch to IE7 and things worked much better. Unfortunately, the balance on my gift card was wrong. I called support, which was actually very responsive and helpful. They said that they just started processing gift cards and their website doesn't handle them very well, and to try again tomorrow. I tried again in two days and it still wasn't working, so I called support back. Support said to try again in a few more days. After about a week I was finally able to pay with my gift card. I complained to support about the fact that they were about a month later than their estimate and she said that they received more orders for Christmas than they anticipated.


The Final Product

On 3/17/08 I got an email from scancafe stating that they were shipping my slides back with my dvd. On 3/24/08 I finally received my original slides and a dvd containing my 124 jpeg scans. Each scan is about 2mb large (I didn't get the TIFF upgrade). I have to say that I am not happy with the scan quality. The scans seem very fuzzy, several of them aren't level, and the colors are very washed out. I am very dissatisfied with their website. In writing this I'm trying to figure out how much I spent total on 124 scans but I can't find on their website any billing in my account. I also can't find a place to figure out my gift card balance.

Summary
I think this service will be very nice in the future, but it seems far too immature at this point. They have a lot of things to work on with regards to the quality of scans, and their website. I'd give them another year before seriously considering working with them again.