Why Choose Karmaan to Scan Your Originals?

We have tried & tested practically every scanner produced since the early 1990s, we know which scanners produce the best scans given the original source material.

We put the right job on the right machine, everytime!

So you’ve googled slide scanning or film scanning and found some other companies, so what makes us different to the rest…?

We can guarantee 100% of these companies do not have the scanners and the skills we have. More importantly 99.9% of them will never have used a true high end Drum Scanner or even have seen the results from a Drum Scanner, only when you use these top end scanners can you truly evaluate other scanners final image quality.

You may see companies offering resolutions of 7200dpi and even 10,000dpi with words such as ‘MAGIC TOUCH’ Cleaning or ‘DIGITAL ICE, DIGITAL SHO, DIGITAL ROC’ etc, even statements such as ‘We use the finest Nikon Scanners’ sets alarm bells ringing in my book, simply because ALL Nikon scanners ever sold were consumer models, the Nikon coolscan 5000ED was only £650 new and the Nikon coolscan 9000 was £1500 when it originally came out.

Sounds impressive, doesn’t it… These terms are used for Scanners made by Reflecta & Nikon, a lot of companies use them as they are the only scanner available that can batch scan slides, they state resolutions now up to 10,000dpi and although they may produce 180mb files, the quality of the files are still vastly inferior to our scans, basically a larger ‘bloated’ file but still very poor in comparison, these scanners are around £1500 new, so still out of reach for most consumers, they have poor optics and very poor software, the scanning options you have (like most scanners these days) are Negative, Positive & Black & White Negative. The true resolution of these scanners is around 3300dpi. You can read me about these with extensive testing at http://www.filmscanner.info/en/ReflectaDigitDia6000.html

If your lucky some companies will be scanning on a NIKON 5000ED Scanner which is better than the reflecta but very slow and again with no film profiles, it uses a cold LED light source which can add odd colour casts to old Kodachromes due to the heavy cyan dyes used in these films, which have a tendency to look blueish in the first place. We have one in the cupboard so know exactly what these scanners produce.

If your really unlucky some companies will be using an Epson V700, V750, V800 or Canon Flatbed to scan your slides, these scanners cannot cope with the thick emulsion of Kodachromes and you will get odd colours and the Digital Ice cleaning system does not work on Kodachromes, also differences in thickness of slide mounts means your scans will not be truly in focus as all these scanners have a fixed focusing system and relys only on the adjustable feet of the holders used.

Of course most of these companies will never tell you what scanner they are using as if your paying a considerable amount of money for your scans they wouldn’t want you to know they’ve stuck them on a £300 epson.

Take a look at just a few of our film profiles we run and you will see why our scans look much better than any other company!