Terms & Conditions

#1 Order Forms

You must send a signed order form with your order. If you do not, it will be assumed that you have read all our terms and conditions and agree to them. If you do not send an order form, it makes processing your order much harder for us.

#2 Please Clean Your Slides

Because of the possibility of damaging your slides, we do NOT clean slides. We advise everyone to go over their slides with a very soft cloth before sending to us. The slides are hit with a small puff of air before scanning but that does not remove anything other than loose material. For the most part, the slides are somewhat greasy, for lack of a better term, and the dirt or dust is going to stick there until you remove it with a soft cloth. We advise you do the cleaning before we scan them. Same is true for View-Master Reels. Because these get magnified even more that regular slides, dust is going to show up even more if you do not clean them, both sides.

#3 Please Clean Your Paper Photos

We have very clean conditions. We want to give you the very best scans that we can. Some would think that it isn't necessary to clean paper photos, but it is. Any dust or lint or whatever might get on your scan is going to be coming from what you send us. We wipe down our scanning glass periodically but a few scans might get through with some kind of unwanted material scanned into your image. If it is there, you sent it to us. At our low pricing, we just can't go back through possibly thousands of photos and find a particular photo and rescan it because you had something stuck to your photo that transferred to our scanner. We don't charge enough to do that.

#4 Unedited Scans

We do not send out unedited scans under any circumstances. Original scans are all deleted after the job is sent out. The job is considered complete and there is no need to take up storage space with original scans. All scans are worked by our Photoshop experts and nothing leaves our offices in a "raw" condition. No exceptions. None. Don't ask. We get your slide scans to look the best we can, and that is what we send you.

#5 Artists, Professional Photographers, Hyper-critical people

Those people that will be hyper-critical, such as artists or professional photographers, should realize that you are not going to be getting a $30 drum scan for our minimal 39 cent pricing. Because of the very nature of this work of scanning possibly thousands of slides, there are no do-overs at this low rate. Do not send any more slides for processing than you are prepared to pay the full cost for our work. Take advantage of our free sample scans or just send a small order to start with so you can see the quality of our work. We take pride in our work and think we give great value at a minimal cost. Try the free sample scans and you will see.

If, after scanning, you want us to go back and pull slides and compare them to images, there will be a per hour charge of $30 or whatever our current rate for editing images is. This is very time and labor intensive and it is not included in our low pricing.

#6 Text Frames

Text Frames are placed at the beginning of Chapters. If you have more Text Frames than chapters, you must divide your slides up so that you will have a chapter for each text frame. To assure accurate spelling, include a text file or send an email with your text. We will copy and paste your text.
Number of "Shows" or "Chapters" on the DVD Menu? Minimum of One show per approximately 100 slides is recommended for good organizational purposes. (These are NOT text frames. Text frames are extra. See above.) Each Carousel will be considered a separate show unless they are divided up even into smaller shows. You can't have one disk be considered as one show. If you don't divide the slides up into small enough shows, we will have to do it for you.

#7 Thicker Than Normal Slides

Pricing is for scanning 35mm or other slides in normal thickness, which would be defined as equal to or less than the thickness of a Quarter Coin, 2"x2" cardboard or plastic mounts. (See instructions for 110, 127 size slides.) (Yes, we do scan your glass mounted slides or the special 3D viewer slides or extra thick mounts but they cost extra. Look for that option on the order form. Call if you need help.)

#8 Text Frames

We cannot be responsible for misspellings in your text frames if you do not provide us with a text file so we can copy and paste.

#9 Slide Shows Are Free

You are paying for conversion of film or photos to digital and our slide shows are free. Because of the different hardware and software and different levels of experience of our customers, we do not guarantee our slide shows will play on all DVD machines. We guarantee our DVDs and CDs, meet universal standards and specifications. Our slide show discs will play in over 95% of players in existence and most all players made in the past 8 years. If a slide show we produce will not play on your DVD player, we will sell you a DVD player at cost (under $50). We use high quality name brand discs and print your titles directly on the slide show disks. No stickers are used on our DVD slide shows. Because of different computer setups, user experience and many unpredictable circumstances, we cannot guarantee that our disk will play as a movie on your computer, although it should if you use Windows Media Player and can play other DVD disks. The images are stored on the disk and, if your computer can read PC DVD disks, you will be able to access the images and copy them to your computer. If you have any doubts about our disks and your machines, please request our free demo disk or send us ten of your slides and we will scan them, edit them and create a free demo disk for you. No charge.

While we will try to make sure you get our free music on your disks, if requested, or we will try to make sure you do not have music on your Slide Show disks, if requested, since this is a free service, and it is possible to make mistakes, we do not guarantee that you will get the music/no music slide show as requested. We do guarantee that you will get our slide show disk for free, if you request it. We just cannot afford to make all your disks over again if we neglect to put/leave off our free music on your free disk, even if you requested it. The same goes for requesting specific transitions: we will try to get it the way you want, but the slide show disk is free and will not be recompiled because you got a transition type that you don't like.

Since wide screen TVs are the future, all DVD slide shows will be created in the 16:9 format unless you request the older 4:3 format. We would suggest that this would be best whether you have a wide screen TV now, or not, because you will have the wide screen TV eventually.

#10 Mac Computers

Regarding Mac computers: We have never had anyone say that their Mac could not, at least, read our disks so that they can pull the images off. As with PCs, computer operator knowledge is important.

#11 Organization And Orientation

35mm slides or Photos should be organized into the order you want them to show. Please check our movie instructions for directions on how to stack your slides properly for scanning. First slide on top, all facing in the same direction, with the "side that faces the screen" UP. You are responsible for having your slides facing in the correct direction for scanning. Although we do not match scans up with numbered slides or photos, if your slides are not numbered, we cannot guarantee that they will be in the correct order. Rubber bands break, handfuls of slides get shuffled, etc. If we don't know the correct order or direction the slides should face, we can't fix it for you. The question you should ask yourself is: What will happen if this stack of slides is dropped on a table? How does the technician get these slides back in the correct order and facing correctly? We do not match up your slides with the scans. The scanning is automated and, if the slide carrier is bent or damaged, it may not feed and then will not be scanned. We don't go back to try to figure out why our count does not match yours. You only pay for what we scan. We do not match up numbers on slides to filenames on images. We are not charging enough for us to do that.

Separate stacks of slides or photos will be put in separate slide show "chapters" all accessible from on-screen menus, unless otherwise clearly noted. Note that each "chapter" over 12 is $1 each. Mark your stacks or envelopes clearly with some way to determine position in the Slideshow, such as: 1A, 1B, 1C, 2, 3A, 3B. All slides in stacks 1A, 1B and 1C will be in show #1. All slides in stack 2 will be in show #2. All slides in stacks 3A and 3B will be in show #3. Photos and 35mm slide scans will be not be intermixed into the same "show" but can be on the same disk. (There can be many "shows" on a disk.) You can make a show #2 with slide scans and a show #3 with photo scans and so on.

If you elect to pay us our minimal fee to do your "slide prep", what we do is get your slides into stacks, rotated and facing the correct way for scanning. We do not look at the dates, if any, on the slides, to get the slides into date order. Too much work there for our minimal fee, especially if you have thousands of slides.

#12 Storage Containers That Incur "Slide Prep" Charges:

These types of containers make it hard for us to be able to maximize our efforts and be able to keep our prices low. These containers result in our having to take extra time to do the scanning because we can't just grab a handful of slides and scan them. We are sorry but somebody has to take the time to stack and orient the slides so we can scan them expeditiously.
If you send your slides to us in these types of containers, or similar, we have to charge you our "slide prep" fee, as above. See our order form for our minimal fee for slide prep.

#13 Slide Condition & Final Images

Please note that we will take whatever steps we deem necessary to do what we think will make your images look as good as possible, given the circumstances. This may include changing a grossly colored image from a slide that had dyes faded away, to black and white or to sepia tone at our discretion. Because, during the scanning process, shadows or dark areas tend to fill in, we also have our Photoshop experts open these shadows up again so more details can be seen. Sometimes contrast and depth of color has to be sacrificed in the process. It is a balancing act to try to get the transfer from one medium to another as good as possible. Please know that we work your images just as though they were our own. All image editing will be at the sole discretion of our Photoshop editors, with no do-overs whatsoever. Realize that you are paying a very minimal price and getting a lot for it. Do not expect drum scanning, at $30+ per slide, which might not even include color matching, for our minimal fee. All color moves are overall and some individual areas of the image might be sacrificed for the good of the whole image. Sunrise and sunset photos, any slides with natural reddish colors are particularly difficult because dye fading on the slide makes it hard to know just what the original looked like. We do not even look at the slide when we do color editing because we are simply editing for "pleasing color" and that is entirely up to the individual Photoshop editor at that time and might even include changing a discolored image to black and white. We do the best we can. We do not guaranty that you are going to be completely happy because you may expect more from your slides than they can deliver. We guaranty that we are going to do the best we can given the amount of time we have to do the work. You can get a good idea of the quality of our work by sending in ten of your slides, good and bad and letting us do a free sample scan for you.

Monitor and TV screens will have different adjustments and an image displayed on 100 different displays may look different on each on. This is the nature of the LCD screen. (From Consumer Reports: "Flat-panel displays deliver a very clear image but have some quirks. Their range of color is a bit narrower than a CRT's and you have to view the screen straight on to get optimal image quality. On most models, the picture can lose contrast as you move off-center, and fine lines might appear grainy.")

Every monitor or TV is going to show color differently. Walk into any Best Buy or other store with multiple monitors showing the same channel and you will see multiple different colored screens. Our monitors are calibrated for precision color and your TV or monitor is not. We cannot adjust our work so it will look the way you want it to look on your monitor or TV. Plus, you have to realize that probably 75% of the slides that we work on are faded or discolored in some way. We do the best we can. If you have any doubts about our process, please send us ten of your slides so that we can do a free sample scan of your slides. Send good ones and bad ones so you can get a feel for our technical expertise. Those people that will be hyper-critical, such as artists or professional photographers, should realize that you are not going to be getting a $30 drum scan for our minimal prices. Because of the very nature of this work of scanning possibly thousands of slides, there are no do-overs at this low rate. Do not send any more slides for processing than you are prepared to pay the full cost for our work. Take advantage of our free sample scans or just send a small order to start with so you can see the quality of our work. Many of your slides will have dirt or fingerprints on them. We do not do slide cleaning. In most cases, the use of a very soft cotton cloth to clean dirt off the slides will greatly improve your final scanning results. Do this before you send them to us. Because of the possibility of damaging slides, we do not clean your slides for you. At our low prices, we cannot be responsible for any dirt on your slides. Slide film that is not perfectly flat may result in part of the scan being out of focus. We see a lot of warped films because the heat from projectors damages the films if they have spent a lot of time in front of the hot projector lamp. We do the best we can with these slides but we can't "un-warp" your slide films. The damage is permanent. Please also check our page regarding "my slides look good but my scans are out of focus."

#14 View-Master Reels

View-Master Reels sometimes become warped and dried out. We have to flatten them to get them ready for scanning. Because of age, the glue holding the films in the reels might come loose and maybe the films will come out of the reel. We do not put them back into the reels. If they come out, they all go into an envelope for return after scanning. Because these get magnified even more that regular slides, dust is going to show up even more if you do not clean them, both sides.

#15 Disc Camera Negative Reels

Realize that Disc Camera Negatives are notoriously

 

#16 VHS Tapes, VHS-C Tapes, Video8 Tapes, MiniDV Tapes, other tapes:

VHS-C tapes. The cost is $10 per 30 minute tape. If there are more than 30 minutes on the tape; then it is $15 per hour.

Tapes are ganged up on as many per DVD disk as we can fit. If you want separate DVD disks for each tape, then there is an extra charge of $10 per unneeded disk. We can get about two hours on each DVD disk. Example: you have two one hour tapes. We could put this all on one DVD disk. If you wanted each hour on a separate disk, we would have to charge an extra $15 for the extra disk. Our disk has a menu item for each movie, so there is no reason for us to have separate disks.

 

#17 Order Changes: Do Not Assume Anything

Once we receive your order, if you change any part of your order, you must document that change specifically and in an email or snail mail and do it before we create disks. Example: If you change from one type of disk format to another format and decide you want or don't want music on your disk, you must specifically state this desire, otherwise no music is usually our default setting. Please do not assume anything. We have a lot of options on our order form for a reason. If you want to make a change, read the order form to understand what your options are and then specifically ask for the options you want. If you have a question, please ask. If you want a change before disks are created, we will be glad to help you. We want you to get what you want. Please confirm any changes discussed on the phone in an email or snail mail.

#18 Return Shipping and Final Payment: Yes, we will return everything to you.

We will return everything that you send to us and we only charge you what it costs us to do it. It is difficult to know, ahead of time, what shipping charges will be because we don't know what kind of containers you will be using. Once we receive your final payment, we ship everything. If you pay with a personal check, we have to wait ten business days, after we make the deposit, before we ship. Please do not overestimate the speed of first class mail in getting your check to us. Also, if we get your check on a Friday, it may not get deposited until the following Monday. Then the ten day wait starts. We do encourage you to send us a Money Order or an Official Bank Check for almost immediate return shipping to you. We are sorry about waiting ten days to make sure a check is good. That is determined by the bank and not by us. Some of the nicest people we know, sometimes have a problem with their checking accounts. Maybe someone else bounced a check on them. It happens and it can snowball from person to person. We can't take the chance that a bounced check is going to affect our checking account and we should probably be waiting even longer.

#19 We Try to Keep Backups of All Scanning Projects

We have kept backup copies of all image scans since 2002. They are on backup hard drives. If you run into a problem with your disks or images, in the future, we very likely will be able to restore your images for you. There is a charge for restoration. We urge everyone to make their own backup copies and keep those copies somewhere other than your home.