There's two and a half services
1/ Dev & Scan - ASDA will dev a C41 for £1 and scan rather than print for another £1 a film or there abouts
Takes me about 1hr to an a film with the web-cam scaner, to get similar 'contact' copies... Just doing the scannig, for 1/5th NMW? Doesnt sound like a great start to a business plan
2/ Archive conversion - scanning in bulk, large sets of old negs to digtal...
Prices again vary enormously, as does quality. Largest likely market would be conversion of old family photo's, after re-discovered at a house clearance. Average household shot around 50 photo's a year; Collections are likely to come on a wide range of obscure formats, from 110 and 120 cartridge film, through 35mm and 120, with a fair few googlies chucked in like disc and APS and 1/2 frame 35mm, and you could be expected to handle them all, an a carrier bag lot, or perhaps 30 films, maybe 750 frames of mixed formats, where anything over £100 or 13p a frame, is likely to raise eye-brows and have folk thinking they could do t cheaper DIY with one of these gadgets advertsed on e-bay.. who are likely to resent being charged for frames that are blank or blurry, that have to be scanned to find that out! And again, you are into the realms where to even make a acceptable scan just the scan time alone is likely well below NMW
2.5/ The 'one off' from sets that every one remembers from the album or mantelpiece, and the whole family want their own copy. Most likely to come as a rather faded and damaged print, rather than a ago, and most of the job will be restoring it rather than scanning it.
Either which way the 'business plan' is ne likely to take some selling.. and ideas of what constitutes a high end scaner, and what constitutes a high quality scan, and what the 'market' will accept, are all very large variables.
I have what I consider a 'fairly' good dedicated film scanner; it cost me £500 17 years ago, and still wacks out images at around 12Mpix, and 48bit colour depth, if I have the patience, to let it sit there for an hour a strip of four, doing 12x or more over scanning. I bought another off e-bay not long ago, for extra carriers and spare parts for just £30 delivered!!!! I can, with lots and lots of practice in the game, set up a strip, and get some pretty good 'raw' scans from it, and leaving it to run, might get five or six films done over a week-end... ready to review, and start correcting and touching.... working through the back archive, I was quite chuffed that last year, I had managed to scan just over 2000 frames from the archive..... of which most are still sitting on my hard dive, maybe five or six films worth actually color & exposure corrected, touched up, crapped and straightened, with a display file I could call 'done'... Using the web-cam scan to make 'proof' copies to review, I think it took me abut three years to scan aprox 6ooo negs, scrap the dodo's and tidy up the better ones, and make an acceptable 1Mpix web display version, before I got lost in what I had and hadn't scanned and frustrated by the low quality I got for the effort it still took me t get the, MOST of the time and effort in the touching and toning to make them half 'reasonable'.
You may have a better scanner, that delivers better scans, that need less work straight out the machine, and delver them at a higher resolution, BUT, on the economics, scanning itself is still only half the job; and it is still usually a long and laborious job, where margins are likely to be small, and expectations high and customers 'awkward' whether they just want all nannas old photo's on their i-phone, or they expect exhibition quality pictures from granddads old 120 cartridge camera, and thumbs across the corners or out of focus photo's are likely to be blamed on you, not the snapper......
As a business plan, its one, that from the start has some pretty major problems to consider, in which, the actual equipment is only very small part of the equation, time, skill and dedication to use it more, and customer expectation, a huge unknown over and above.
I have carrier bags of old family snaps, dumped on me fro freinds and family, usually whenever they come accross them when some-one moves, goes in a home or dies... I do NOT go to funerals any more because of the carrier bags and "We found these when we were going through her stuff... you couldn't put them on a CD for us so we can see what they all are can you?"!!!! Well, I also hate funerals, but the carrier bags are probably worse! And I get a phone call or txt msg a week later "Have you don't them pctures yet?" And they do get narky that when you have been imposed on to do them a favor, you don't do it instantly, and the cant understand ts NOT a five minute job, and they do expect you to just sitck the while bag in a machine and press a button, and have 1000 photo's on one CD or flash drive in half an hour! Tell them they can try and find a pro to look at the mixed B&W or faded colour prints and loose, usually scratched negs in the bag and do more, more quickly for less than £1 a picture, and they start getting narky about it... It's really sn't something I would try and base a business plan, or even try subsiding the cost of my hobby on!! have before ow, loaned some-one my web-cam scanner, when shown another carrier bag, and told them to follow the instructions.... and inquiring whether they had done with t a week later, has elicited the reply "Well we have done a few... but if you want your scanner back, we may have to buy or own" or "We've done a few, but... doesn't lok like many of the pictures they took came out, really..." or, lots of other things I have learned the hard way from other carrier bags!
Fresh off the stops, with a new machine, and little practice using it? My advice is do what you want to do with it; learn to get the best from it; decide if you can make a half decent job out of it AND enjoy doing it with pctures you are actually interested i doing, and seeing... then ponder how much you might get selling it on whe yo are done, compare to how much you probably wouldn't make, for the time to scan other people's pictures, the time to deal with those people, doing pictures you have little interest in looking at, and none dong, beyond making a little cash back to pay for the machine....... I enjoy it, I really do, BUT if I could get some-one else to scan my back archive for me, for the price of a new scanner, and save me the time and hassle, I would! While dealing with friends and relatives who expect miricles for free, is bad enough, without the added hassle of 'obligation' imposed by a payment, to likely make less than I could spending that time stacking shelves in Tesco's? "Here's the scanner, have fun, let me know how you get o!" If any-one was prepared to pay be £100 a film it probably wouldn't be enough! But it's your call..... you want to go into business, do your market research, properly, and build a business plan, see if you can make it work for you... but I suspect you'll probably conclude its not worth it.
