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Walgreens' Slide Scanning Service
See Walgreens' scanning comparison, below.
We don't have a lot of time to do research into what our competition is doing since we can count on our competition checking us out and trying to match our prices or figure out some way to make it look like they are giving the same services that we do for less. We lead, they follow. Then along comes Walgreens getting into the slide scanning business. We were at a show recently and overheard some people walking by and one person was saying to the other: "Oh, we can just go to Walgreens to have that done." Sure you can. But are you going to be happy with their work? We decided that we would save you the trouble of finding out the hard way by doing a test of our own. This test was done at the Sun Prairie East side Walgreens on 7/1/08. Your results may be different; maybe even worse. That is one more downside to having Walgreens do your scanning work: you never know what minimum wage worker might be working on your slide scanning project or even if they might be sending your slides off to some unknown third party to outsource the work.
We took twenty slides of various sizes, 35mm, 127 super slides, 120 slides and 110 slides, just to give them a test of slides we run into all the time. We took the slides in and left them there and two days later we picked the completed job up. Got it to the office and put the disk in the computer. Turns out that, out of twenty scans of twenty slides, only two scans made it onto the disk. We called Walgreens up and they said that these things happen and they would scan them over again. So, we had to take them back and give them a second shot at scanning twenty slides and maybe getting it right this time.
Needless to say, we were not impressed with Walgreens' work as scanning our test slides. The scans were flat and discolored with hardly any attempt at improving the colors. Walgreens also scanned every slide at the 35mm setting on their scanner. This meant that the 127 super slides got cropped down so that they lost almost half the slide. At Affordable 35mm Slide Scanning, we scan the whole 127 film area and we do not charge extra to do it. When Walgreens scanned the 120 slides, which are almost square, they cropped off the top and the bottoms of the slides and they left black bars on each side of the scan. When Walgreens scanned the 110 slides, they did not enlarge the image at all. They just scanned it with their 35mm slide setting. As you can tell by the example below, it is just a small image with big black bars on all sides. This type of poor quality work would never get past our skilled technicians.
