Do you have a box of 35mm slides you’d like to convert to digital photos? You have two ways you could proceed. You could either buy a scanner that is capable of scanning film (both positives or negatives) or you could farm out the work. GT Recording, HomeDVD and iMemories are 3 such companies which offer slide scanning services. iMemories offers photo, negative and slide scanning.

If you want to buy a scanner you could consider something like the Canon CanoScan 9000F which has attachments that let you scan a few slides or negatives at a time at 4800 dpi. It costs about $200 or less. If you can get your hand on a discontinued Nikon Coolscan professional high-speed slide scanner, then you could use it. As I recall, these scanners could hold 20 slides at a time and would scan each one at about 4000 dpi in about 30 seconds and automatically move through the entire stack.

If you prefer to farm out this work you could drop off your slides at GT Recording in Seattle. They charge scan slides at either 3600 or 7200 dpi. They charge a flat $15 setup fee. They have different price tiers that currently look like this:

• less than 100 slides cost $1.25 each
• 100-499 slides cost $.99 each
• 500-999 slides cost $.89 each
• more than 1000 slides cost $.79 each

iMemories scans at 600 dpi and charges $0.49 per photo, slide or negative

Home DVD offers a range of resolutions at different prices. Refer to the table below for details. They’ll scan both photos and slides.

For photo transfer to DVD, your price is $0.99 per photo for any size up to 12 x 15 inches in size. All slides and photos needing to have additional adjustments to bring out the best image possible will be brought into Adobe Photoshop for repair at no extra charge.  Below is a chart that will help you determine which resolution would best suit your needs:

The per slide/photo charges described above include the price to burn your digitized JPEG images of your 35mm slides or photos onto as many DVD-R discs as necssary. There is a minimum charge of $45.00 per job.

Do you have boxes of papers that you’d like to scan so you can empty your closet or storage area then easily access them on your Mac laptop when you travel?

Do you have some large blueprints or drawings that don’t fit on your office scanner? Do you want to convert microfilm to be read on your Mac?

In any of these cases, you should check out US Archive and Imaging Services (USArchive). They are an Issaquah-based company that can help you with your scanning, document management and shredding needs while using their standard and large-format, high-speed scanners to scan any documents. They prep your documents first by removing staples, sticky notes and even paperclips, then they turn your documents into searchable PDFs or any other file type you desire. US Archive offers cloud-based and on-premise document access as well as storage solutions.  Once the scanning is finished you have some choices. They will return your documents in the exact order that you gave them to them, or if you’d like they can securely destroy (shred) the documents.

There are several factors that affect the cost of your job, but in general a rough cost would be around 9 cents per page (this including prep, scanning and indexing.) Note, a standard records box holds about 2,200 sheets of paper. I recently had them scan a box of my records and found them to be very responsive and friendly. If you’d like to learn more about US Archive and their services, check out their Frequently Asked Questions web page.  Another interesting note is that US Archive has partnered with AtWork. AtWork is a 50 year old local non-profit which focuses on finding work for people with disabilities. Hiring US Archive supports AtWork’s efforts to help teach new skills to these individuals and help them to get meaningful employment.

Would you like to free up some desk space by retiring either your stand-alone fax machine or multi-fuction printer which has faxing capabilities? Or, if you’re paying for a dedicated fax line, would you like to reduce you phone bill by dropping that line? If so, here are a few alternatives you could consider. I’m surprised that faxes haven’t faded away completely. I’m convinced that it’s because many people don’t know how easy scanning can be. Personally, I find that I only need to receive or send at most a handful of faxes each year, but in some fields, especially healthcare, faxes seem to be going strong. One reason faxing is so strong in the healthcare field is the need to comply with HIPAA or other laws. I highlight HIPAA-compliant Internet fax options below. Whether your faxing needs are light or heavy, here are some alternatives for you to consider.

Option 1 – This is the easiest option to setup but not necessarily the most cost-effective or convenient. You could out-source your faxing needs and use a FedEx Office store or, if you live in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, a business like Sip and Ship. Both of these businesses will let you send or receive faxes and charge you a fee per page.

Option 2 – Sign up for an Internet fax service like Faxaway or RingCentral. I have experience using both of these services. When you sign-up for a Faxaway account you’re assigned a fax number in the 206 (Seattle-area) area code. For a monthly fee of $1 you can receive unlimited incoming faxes and send faxes at a cost of about 10 cents per page. Faxes sent to your fax number are forwarded to you as email attachments. You can then save the attachment and open it on your Mac. Print a copy if you’d like. I like to receive my faxes via email since I can then save them or forward them easily. You also send faxes via email by using the fax number as part of  the email address, for example, 12065551212@faxaway.com. Faxaway is a good option if you’re a one person business with very light faxing needs.

If your business has a few employees or you have heavier faxing needs, then one of RingCentral’s plans might be a better fit. You can sign-up for a free trial account to test RingCentral. Their entry-level plan costs $8/month which gives you a local or toll-free fax number and 500 pages of inbound or out bound faxes. RingCentral provides a Macintosh application which you install on your Mac. You use this app to both send and receive faxes. This application also makes it easy to send documents as part of your fax, but it unfortunately doesn’t tie into your Mac’s Address Book application. Therefore, you’ll need to either enter your fax numbers by hand or by using “copy and paste”. Your RingCentral fax service can easily be shared by several people. In a future Tech Tip I’ll write about how you could use RingCentral to replace your existing phone system.

If you’re in a business that needs to comply with HIPAA regulations or other security or privacy regulations then you could check out Sfax, InterFAX or FaxSolutions. These companies fax services cost more then the previous Internet fax services I mentioned. I haven’t personally worked with this companies to know how user-friendly they are.

Option 3 – This is my favorite and most commonly used solution. When a person asks me to sign a document and fax it back to them, I simply ask if I could scan it and return it to them as an email attachment. With rare exception, the person is perfectly happy to receive the document as an email attachment. In a previous Tech Tip, I talked about how I much I love my Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner. It turns a pile of pages into a PDF which I can then easily attach and send via email. I like this method since I then have a digital copy of the document on my computer if I need to refer to it later on. Also, I have a more detailed paper trail than if I’d sent a fax since my sent mail folder will have a record of when I sent a document and to whom.

Hopefully, one of these options will be a good fit for your faxing needs.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap is a compact, easy-to-use scanner which will scan a stack of two-sided pages and turn them into a searchable PDF with the press of just one button. I use my ScanSnap several times throughout the week to scan documents as well as receipts of various sizes. I highly recommend the ScanSnap.

I bought my first ScanSnap, the S510M, in January 2007 and it’s still going strong after 2900 scans. Fujitsu has replaced this model with the S1500M and the S1300.

I was fortunate enough to win an S1300 in a recent give-away by a Fujitsu representative. The S1300 can be powered by either a power cord or via a USB port on your computer. (It needs a second, separate USB port for transmitting the scanning data.) The software bundled with the S1300 includes some new features and is compatible with my three year-old S510M. If you own an older ScanSnap you can download the current ScanSnap software which is compatible with Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard.

The bundled Macintosh software includes Fujitsu’s own ScanSnap Manager as well as two third-party applications — Abby FineReader 4.1 for ScanSnap and ReadIRIS’ CardIRIS 3.6 for ScanSnap. FineReader is an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) application that let’s you turn your PDFs into searchable PDFs, editable Word or Excel documents. CardIRIS also does OCR, but is intended for business cards. It lets you scan a business card and turn it into a record in Apple’s Address Book.

The S1300 is also the first fully cross-platform ScanSnap model. In the past, ScanSnap scanners have been bundled with either Mac-compatible software or Windows-compatible software though the scanner hardware itself works with either Macs or PCs. The S1300 comes with one DVD which contains both Mac and Windows software.

Fujitsu has added a host of other appealing features over the past few years. Here are a few highlights.

• Right-clicking on the Dock icon let’s one select either Simplex (one-sided) or Duplex (two-sided) scans in case you don’t want to scan the back-side of a document such as a store receipt.

• ScanSnap Manager’s Application section lets you scan a document directly to a number of destinations such as iPhoto, your printer or an attachment in a new email message.

• Marking text with a highlighter pen will turn that text into a keyword in your searchable PDF.

The paperless office that has been prophesied has not appeared, but my ScanSnap lets me reduce the amount of paper records that I have in my filing cabinets. I scan most documents so they are always available on my laptop. Of course, a robust backup system is important if you’re going to entrust all of these documents to your computer.
Note: ScanSnaps do not conform to TWAIN, ISIS and WIA standards.

Update 03-2011: I recently learned that Fujitsu has created a number of ScanSnap Tips and Tricks including one on how to clean your ScanSnap and how to replace the consumables.

Update: 01-2013: MacWorld recently published a comparison between ScanSnap’s current high-end scanner, the ScanSnap iX500 and Neat’s NeatDesk.  Read the comparison yourself, but I’m glad that I have a ScanSnap. I might check out Neat’s software for Mac. If I like it, I can configure it to use my ScanSnap.