Why should a company outsource their microfilm scanning instead of scanning in-house?
"The reasons for sending microfilm scanning work outside are the obvious –cost, time and expertise – plus not so obvious ones. Production scanners for roll film scanning, microfiche scanning, aperture card scanning, and so on,are getting better and more advanced and you pay for the improvements, but it's not just the cost of the equipment. You also have to factor in the overhead, training and expertise that operators gain after years of scanning microfilm. In a new installation, by the time you would have the equipment set up, an operator(s) trained, and the necessary QC work done, you'd have spent 3-4 months and have affected the the microfilm conversion price. If something goes wrong, what do you do? What about downtime? When you handle the volume we do, you have more flexibility and you develop expertise in-house users rarely achieve, even big title companies and insurance companies or government agencies."
And this is true. In terms of cost, a one million image 16 mm conversion job ca cost thousands, but is considerably less than what it would take a company to buy microfilm scanners and attempt to convert roll film to digital images in-house. The microfilm scanning price can be thousands less if you select the right company to do it for you.
