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Thread: Drum scanning in India

  1. #21

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    Drum scanning in India

    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.)

  2. #22
    bob carnie's Avatar
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    Drum scanning in India

    I totally agree with Frank on this one,

    I considered a scanning service with my lab operation , but have held off for various reasons, For example a good Drum Scanner
    ( Tango or Crossfield ) in past years would cost 100k plus an experienced technican to run it 50K. Now with digital capture the commercial world is driven with phase and high end 35mm digital.
    I put my bucks into the printing devices and processors. If I need a drum scan I have friends in the industry who will do it for me , If I need an Imogan scan , we rent.
    A lot of my clients have ganged together exactly like Frank suggests and bought Imogons in groups. Very positve feedback on this approach.
    We will buy an Imagon here , very shortly to be able to satisfy our need, I will indeed wait for the graphic houses to start dumping the Crosfields or Tangos. Then the price is reasonable.
    I have made very large prints from the same series printed onto fibre paper using digital files scanned from Tango and Imogon, bluntly 7 out of 8 photographers cannot tell which one is which.
    Nancy Scans and Repro Scans do a very excellent service, I have printed files from both companys. They are dedicated to scanning and as Frank points out excell at this stage of the photographic process.
    I predict , looking in my crystal ball that they will land at $30.00 US within 16months for a very good scan.
    This is how internegs ended up and I believe scanning will be the same, I would support these kind of companys as you will definately get a good , quality file as well as gaurenteed redo if you are not happy.
    Repro scans are very receptive to their clients needs>>>> by the way this is not an add for them as I only know of them through my clients files , that we have printed here in toronto

  3. #23

    Drum scanning in India

    This is a fascinating thread, on more than one level.

    On the outsourcing issue - I'm of two minds. On the one hand, I live in (and love) the small rural town in which I live. I understand, at a primal level that many who live in the big city do not, the importance of jobs, local jobs, to the community.

    On the other hand, I also understand that people in India need jobs, too. The same technology that makes it possible for me to ship my film to India to have it scanned (e.g. worldwide access to fast, reliable computing and networking, and worldwide reliable delivery via Fedex or similar) also makes it possible for someone in India to buy a print from me, or from some other artist living here in the Snoqualmie Valley.

    On another tack, I find the problem of how to economically get more than 1000 5x7 transparencies scanned well pretty interesting.

    1000 transparencies is a lot. And, unless Tuan has stopped photographing, there's more film to be scanned in the future.

    Those 1000+ trannies represent a HUGE asset. I'd be leery of trusting the entirety of that asset to some folks on the other side of the planet - not because I expect that people in India are inherently non-trustworthy (I expect that they're actually about like folks here), but because if something goes wrong, it's darn hard to solve the problem from 12,000 miles away.

    That alone would make me look at the economics of having the work done locally. If you hire it out to a lab, they've got to pay their overhead. They've got to pay salaries for the worker, they've got to pay for the equipment.

    I'd be looking hard at one of the following two arrangements:

    1. Buy a high end scanner, like an Imacon. Hire some high school or college student with some reasonable skill to do the work (easy if you live near a pool of such talent, hard if you don't). If you're paying them, say, $15/hour and they can scan three transparencies an hour, then your paying them something like $10/scan given the cost of paying FICA, etc. You have to pay for the Imacon, but at the end of the process, you still own the Imacon and can either sell it, depreciate it and write it off against taxes, or you could even branch out and offer scanning services.

    2. An interesting model comes from observing that all you really need to do is get all 1000+ scanned well enough for your catalog. Once they're in the catalog, you can always send the transparency out for a drum scan at a lab when the order comes in. Yes, there's an issue with product delivery times, but perhaps that can be worked. If all you need is scans for web display, or even for small prints, you could get by with, say, the Microtek 1800f that I use (both for web and for prints up to 40"x50" from 4x5). A Microtek costs a heck of a lot less than an Imacon.

    All this flows from the observation that my Jobo Cpp-2 was an expensive beast, and I hesitated to buy it because of the cost. Despite that expense, it's paid for itself over the years I've had it just in avoided costs of taking my film to a lab and having it run at the prices they charge, even if you allow for time value of money involved. And, I get great control over the results.

    Likewise, if you're not doing your own printing, it would make sense to bring that in house as well. An Epson 7600 or 9600 is expensive, yes, but you can pay for it with the profit from a surprisingly small number of prints.

  4. #24

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    Drum scanning in India

    By the time you sent 1000 chromes to India and back, you'd probably spend almost as much as an Imacon. But you would risk your film, and probably have at least a small percentage of re-dos.

    I think you could find a smart High School kid to run an Imacon successfully, and 95% of your scans would turn out as good as you could do them, once the kid gets some training and practice.

    Or you could offer to purchase an Imacon for a hungry photographer in trade for him doing all your scanning, forever.

    Or, do what I do. Make friends with a fellow with an Imacon and buy him woodworking tools and Scotch. It's cheaper than paying a service and it is more fun. Isn't that the idea?

    A used Tango is only $24K or so last I checked. Screen also makes a good drum scanner in the teens, and of course you can get various Imacons for under $10K. There is also the Creo Scitex flatbeds, but they are more for stock agencies that realize they have to scan a bunch of stuff and not indidvidually mount each peice of film.

    Frankly, I rather have a good, well scanned Imacon (or even an Epson) scan than a mediocre scan from a Tango. Doing it yourself or working closely with the scanner operator is by far the most important aspect.

  5. #25
    tim atherton's Avatar
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    Drum scanning in India

    will the imacons do 5x7? just?
    You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees... - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn

    www.photo-muse.blogspot.com blog

  6. #26

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    Drum scanning in India

    EUR 12,- for a wonderful 250MB scan on an Imacon 949 over here in good old Europe. Even cheaper than good Scotch ...

    Regards,

  7. #27

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    Drum scanning in India

    Yep, they do 5x7 and 6x17.

  8. #28
    Founder QT Luong's Avatar
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    Drum scanning in India

    About a year ago, I researched buying my own high-end scanner. At that time, the conclusions I reached was that the best
    quality to price ratio would be obtained by buying a used drum scanner. Used drum scanners were quite plentiful and could be had for $5000. It looked like only the more recent Imacons could match those in quality, and being quite new, it wasn't possible to find them on the used market. The price for new units able to scan 5x7 starts at $10,000. The only problems that prevented me from going that route were the lack of space in my house and my general lack of time. With that in mind, it seems to make sense to just look for space and labour elsewhere.
    I do not expect a company in India to scan on the Tango, but rather on one of those older scanners that I was contemplating buying. However, as I was told, those scanners, if operated properly (I believe many people in India are technically skilled and well-educated) produce results that are at least as good as an Imacon.

    I understand well the risk of the operation, however, I have a number of safeguards. First, as described in the workflow I wrote for the LF page, I try to systematically expose two sheets for each composition, so I would have a duplicate. Second,
    after the initial test batch, I would consider traveling myself to India to deliver the transparencies, make some personal contact with the company, then to go around the country for a month of interesting travel photography while the film is being scanned, and take home a hard drive with the scans. Even if I didn't proceed that way, as for the cost of shipping exceeding $10,000 (the price of a mid-range Imacon), I am pretty sure there must have been a confusion between tranies and glass plates :-)

    I have experimented with the idea of making a flat-bed scan for cataloguing with a demo file (as opposed to a final file). I use an Epson 4870, whose ICE feature, although lacking, is still a great time saver, which cause me to chose this particular scanner. However, I found this method to be inefficient: it takes a significant amount of time to scan and then prepare the demo master file from the scan. Then if I get an order based on that demo master file, not only I need to redo the work again based on a better scan, but I also need to somehow match the appearance of the second master file to the first one.

    The idea of the scanner or printer paying for itself after a large order makes a lot of sense from a hobbyst's (this word is not to be taken in a pejorative way) perspective. However, from a business viewpoint, what has to be compared is just the time (the big unknown) and money it takes to operate your scanner or printer, versus the time and money it takes to have scans or prints done by someone else.

  9. #29

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    Drum scanning in India

    Perhaps I'll just pin my hopes on Bob's scenario coming true with the market price of drum scanners plummeting even further. In Luong's case, with so many scans needed, the India thing makes a lot more sense if he can find a shop over there that he likes.

  10. #30

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    Drum scanning in India

    I suppose if we really want to respect the drum scanning companies, we'd all be going to Stuttgart for our scanning (Heidelberg HQ) or Kyoto (Screen) or Brussels (Imacon). Since we really don't expect people to do that, then going to India isn't wrong either.

    I still think QT should take a tip from the stock agencies and see what they are doing...

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