In the dot.com era I looked very closely at starting a scanning business with Tangos and online delivery, figuring that I could use RIT kids to beat Nancy Scans and the like with better service/value/online capabilities.
Guess what? The customers and money isn't there. I tested the competition and did my market research.
IMHO, everybody should just get an Imacon. Or teams of people should get an Imacon (everybody kick in $2000 and share one.) Use an Epson for commercial work (it's fine for most jobs) and an Imacon for big prints.
If drum scanning was such a good business, we'd see a lot more competition and prices would fall. But it's a tough, lousy business, with lots of subjective time-wasting effort that doesn't pay out, so very few competitors are going to enter. Nancy Scans and the like deserve what they get because they EARN their money, no doubt about it.
Shipping film to India, and waiting for it, is going to be attractive to to stock agencies. But any decent stock agency is going to purchase their own scanner and $20/hr kid, and that will beat out even the Indian scans when it comes to quality control, etc. Of course, if quality control is NOT important, then why would they be in the market for drum scans anyway?
At $5 a scan, and good productivity, they are still going to need a year to pay off a Tango in India - sounds sketchy to me. (income of 5 scans per hour x 2000 hours per year x $5 = $50K; overhead of a used Tango (no idea of duties) = $20K, plus 2000 hr x $5/hr for the operator = $30K. So they make $20K profit, not counting start-up costs, space, servers, PCs, mistakes, and marketing. I guess it works if they have a source of customers already lined up, but it's a tight spot.)
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