The Job of film-to-digital scanning can be begun by becoming an expert on the technology. Read computer and photography magazines, visit trade shows, consult web sites, and tap the expertise of knowledgeable equipment salespeople. Draw up a detailed business plan with reasonable assumptions to determine how much of an investment makes sense. You might want to start out offering just slide, negative, and print conversions; the technology is more mature and the investment a bit less. Advertise your availability through flyers at community centers, senior centers, and schools. Place ads in newspapers and shopping guides. You might be able to establish a relationship with area photo, art supply, or framing stores to allow you to advertise there in return for referring customers to them for services you don’t provide.

You can get a sense of prices by consulting web sites of companies offering these sorts of services. We found prices for slide scanning ranging from about 45 cents to $1 each for basic work and from about $1 to $2.50 per slide for high-resolution scanning. Prices for scanning negatives were higher because of additional time required on most systems; we saw prices of about 80 cents to $1.60 for basic work. For transfer from film to VHS tape, prices were about 10 cents per foot at basic levels of resolution and without digital restoration. Prices for transforming film images to DVD were priced from 12 to 25 cents per foot, depending on level of resolution and amount of restoration. Scanning a print to digital form and restoring it can range in price from $5 to $50, depending on the amount of touch-up required. In addition to per-image or per-foot charges, companies add charges for CDs and DVDs provided to the client, plus shipping costs.