Photo Scanning - What To Look Out For When Using a Bulk Photo Scanning Service

So for whatever reason you may have you're looking at outsourcing your photographs to be scanned and converted to digital. This could be because your company would like all original photographs scanned and indexed so they can be disposed of to save space, you want to complete a project which requires the photos to be digital, or you would like them converted so they can be used in publications, then outsourcing has probably come to your mind for scanning a larger quantity of photographs.

Most bulk document scanning companies will offer a photo scanning service and you should search for a reputable one of those, but what should you look out for so you don't get bad results or worse still the original photos become damaged or ruined?

There are a number of things you can do to try to avoid this, some common sense and we also offer some tips and advice for you to try out too.

When you contact the company, which I would do by phone to get a better feel for who you're going to be dealing with, ask questions about the service such as 'What quality do you scan at?' 'Would you recommend my photos be scanned in colour or black and white?' 'How long will the process take?' and 'What does the photo scanning process involve?'. If they give you detailed answers to these questions and even a little more information about it a little further away from your question, this is always a good sign that the person there knows what they're talking about. In the instance of the colour or black and white question, they should also offer you greyscale as a further option, which is a higher quality version of a black and white image for example.

Also, ask the company about their accreditation. Certification such as the ISO 9001:2000 are always a good sign as this means that their work is evaluated by a third party to ensure quality, but if they have qualifications further along than this, it's a good sign, but make sure to check them out to ensure that they aren't simply trying to make themselves look more impressive. If they lie about something like this, it's more than likely they don't have a very good sense of business.

Another tip is to visit the place where the work is done if possible so you can witness for yourself the process going on. Don't think that this is rude or too forward; they should welcome you with open arms if they are a reputable company who are confident in what they do.

Possibly most important of all is getting a small sample of work completed for you. Again the company should be happy to assist with this and scan and index the files for you, which shouldn't take long at all. If this take more than a few days to complete then it's not exactly professional. You could argue that they are very busy, but if they can't complete a couple of photos for you as examples with the possibility of more work, then they aren't worth bothering to pursue.

When you receive the files back, check them for their image quality, colour and make sure they aren't grainy. Obviously if the original image is grainy or distorted in any way, there is nothing that the company can do about that, but have a really good look at the quality of the scans by viewing the high quality images at 100% in your image viewer software.

That might sound like a lot to keep your eye out for, but it's definitely worth it if you are planning on having a bulk photo scanning service done. As we always say, it's better to be safe than sorry.

Steve Wright is marketing manager for Pearl Scan Solutions, a document scanning and photo scanning company based in the UK. We have been in business for nearly a decade now and have completed work for the likes of the NHS, Sky TV and the BBC and our photo scanning service is second to none with the most up to date and high quality scanners in use.

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Document Scanning Services - Five Reasons Why You Must Hire A Document Management Company

There a five main reasons why you must hire a document management company and use the best document scanning service in your business if you are still saving most of your customer information on paper or on microfilm and other plastic media.

In this short article we will discuss the financial reasons, and the reasons having to do with information processing, the ease and quality of document retrieval, document conversion, storage, and re-storage.

By the time you are done reading you should have a good idea whether these reasons are sufficient for you to start looking really seriously into document scanning services and records conversion services offers.

Financial reason number one for hiring the right scanning service

Ultimately, all reasons for introducing new services in your business have to do with improving the financial health of your enterprise. Here we will only touch on the reasons that will instantly and directly affect your bottom line.

The first financial reason to hire record scanning company is that you will reduce your cost of paper information storage. Especially if your business is located in the expensive part of town where the rents are high, your document storage will end up costing you more as your business matures. This goes against the notion that the business should be more profitable in time! Transferring the information into an electronic form will reduce storage costs, and remove paper storage costs if you decide to shred the paper versions. Or, at the very least, you can ship them somewhere where the storage costs are much lower.

Financial reason number two: retrieval and restocking of documents

The second direct financial reason for using document scanning systems is that documents scanning will reduce the time it takes to retrieve the information once is needed again, as well as reduce the time to restock the information. If everything is done right, and you have a person at $10 / hour (example) to do just that, and if it takes them 1/2 hour to find the document and 1/2 hour to re-stock the document, you would be saving $10 by just a single query into your electronic data management system.

Ease and quality of retrieval

With the electronic document management system which includes optical character recognition, OCR scanning you do not have to be limited to a single storage system, such as storing information by client name, or by property address. Through advanced indexing of all textual data, and through advanced annotation of image and time series data, searching for documents and document retrieval becomes easy and more natural, as well as ultimately more effective. You will be able to get more relevant data in a shorter amount of time. This will positively influence your bottom line.

Ease of storage

Since there is no paperwork, the storage of information becomes easy. Even when there is paper involved, it will immediately be scanned into the electronic document management system, annotated appropriately, and the paper version will either be destroyed or eventually shipped to an inexpensive storage location.

Ease of re-storage

Has it occurred to you that copying of electronic documents is almost seamless while making paper copies creates more clutter and chaos?

Another difference stemming from this wonderful feature is that electronic data never need to be restocked or re-stored after use. They are simply copied to the computer where you need them, and kept there for the time that you need them there. This is in sharp contrast with paper files, which have to be carried in and out of storage space, at a substantial cost in time and money.

Source:http://ezinearticles.com/?Document-Scanning-Services---Five-Reasons-Why-You-Must-Hire-A-Document-Management-Company&id=5780676

The Risks of Ultrasound Scans for the Mother and the Unborn Child

Are ultrasound scans necessary?

By the mid-eighties more than 100 million people throughout the world had experienced ultrasound scans before they were born. Today, practically every pregnant woman in Europe and in North America will have at least one ultrasound scan during her pregnancy. Most expectant women receive their first referral for a scan during their first ante-natal appointment; only a few of them question whether it is necessary and even fewer know of its potential harm. Most women's magazines, newspapers, and pregnancy books tend to recommend ultrasound scans to ensure the safety and healthy development of the fetus, despite the fact that no study proves that having an ultrasound scan provides more benefits than not having one. In an official statement, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) admitted that no well-controlled study has yet proven that routine scanning of prenatal patients will improve the outcome of pregnancy.

On the other hand, researchers in New York studied 15,000 pregnant women who received ultrasound scans. They concluded that scanning provided no benefits whatsoever in any of the risk categories such as premature babies, fetal death, multiple births, late-term-pregnancies, etc. In fact, up to this date, ultrasound scans have not revealed any information that is of clinical value. On the contrary, there is more evidence today than ever before that scans can be harmful for both the mother and the unborn child. The Association for Improvements in the Maternity Services (AIMS), England, recorded cases of women who aborted their perfectly fit and healthy babies as a result of misinterpreted scans. It is almost impossible to estimate how many women went through similar ordeals since most cases are not reported.

In 1990 researchers in Finland conducted a large trial study with ultrasound. The ultrasound scans diagnosed 250 women with placenta previa in early pregnancy, a condition where the placenta lies low and therefore may prevent the baby from being born vaginally. The mothers were informed that they should expect a Caesarean section. But when it came to giving birth, only 4 women still had placenta previa. In almost all cases, the placenta moved out of the way when the womb began to grow. Ironically, the control group, which received no ultrasound scanning also had 4 women with placenta previa; all of them delivered their babies safely.

Human Guinea pigs

Despite the fact that respected medical journals like the Lancet, The Canadian Medical Association Journal, and the New England Journal of Medicine have all written about the hazardous effects of ultrasound use, mainstream medicine has all but ignored the negative evidence. Even the FDA has commented on the dangers of ultrasound. According to a story by the Associated Press, their position on the technique is this: "Ultrasound is a form of energy, and even at low levels, laboratory studies have shown that it can produce physical effects in tissue, such as jarring vibrations and a rise in temperature... prenatal ultrasounds can't be considered innocuous."

Millions of women around the world, without being aware of the potential health hazards of ultrasounds, are participating in the largest medical experiment of all times. Their babies are the guinea pigs in this experiment. They become vulnerable to external and internal harmful influences when their delicate electromagnetic fields are distorted, misaligned or damaged by highly concentrated doses of ultrasound; exposure to that is neither natural nor suitable for any human being. We cannot solely rely on machines for diagnostic purposes just because machines are considered less likely to make mistakes than doctors. All findings have to be interpreted properly before they can serve as a guide for treatment. As demonstrated in the above study, 98.4 percent of the initial complications during the women's pregnancy cleared on their own simply because the body knows how to handle such problems perfectly well without intervention. Machines don't know that the readings they produce may actually turn out to be a wrong diagnosis.

A false diagnosis is not the only disadvantage that may arise from using ultrasound indiscriminately. In 1993 Australian researchers studied 3,000 women and found that frequent ultrasound scanning between 18 and 38 weeks of pregnancy could produce babies up to a third smaller than normal. Similar studies revealed that babies who had received Doppler ultrasound (to scan the baby's blood supply) had a lower birth weight than babies who didn't receive a scan.

If the birth weight of a baby is reduced through ultrasound, what about other functions which are even more important for a baby's growth? One professor in Calgary, Canada, discovered that children developed speech problems twice as often when exposed to ultrasound in the womb. Surgeon James Campbell from Canada found that even one prenatal scan may be sufficient to cause delayed speech. Norwegian studies suggested ultrasound scanning might even lead to mild brain damage in the developing fetus.

One large-scale Swedish study showed a link between ultrasound scanning and left-handedness, which is often the result of slight prenatal brain damage. The study revealed a 32 percent greater chance of left-handedness among the ultrasound group when compared to an un-scanned control group. Needless to say, since 1975, when doctors started aggressive ultrasound scanning late in pregnancy (usually to determine the baby's sex), rates of left-handedness have increased dramatically - especially among male babies.

Ultrasound was approved as a medical tool of diagnosis under a different category than that used to approve drugs. Science has not yet studied the effects of using these different powers of energy. As long as this is the case, ultrasound examinations are under the umbrella of 'legal protection'. The complete lack of scientific research backing up the safety of ultrasound scans should caution both doctors and pregnant women.

Yet the scanning of pregnant woman has become such a routine practice today that not many women want to go without it. Scans give parents the opportunity to get to know their baby long before it is born, although women were able to be in touch with their babies before the invention of ultrasound. Today you can find out whether your baby is male or female, which leaves no room for surprises. You can also get the exact date of delivery although, provided there are no complications, you can calculate the birth date of your child yourself. An ultrasound scan may reveal if a baby suffers from Down's syndrome but it doesn't tell you how serious the condition is. The added information that ultrasound can give makes little or no difference because babies in general cannot be treated before or shortly after birth. After examining all the results from published trials using ultrasound scans, a team of doctors from Switzerland failed to come up with evidence suggesting that the use of ultrasound could improve the condition of the babies.

Furthermore, a large trial study in the United States concluded that receiving an ultrasound scan produced no difference in prenatal mortality rates or in sick babies than not receiving an ultrasound. What is most disconcerting, however, is that the latest ultrasound technology is to be introduced into use without any trials. It consists of a vaginal probe that is covered by a condom and inserted directly into the woman's vagina. With the new technology, doctors will get an even better picture of the fetus but the baby will also get a much higher dose of ultrasound.

Even though an increasing number of health professionals are very concerned about the wholesale use of scans, pregnant women are not informed about the possible harmful consequences that accompany their use. Scans are prescribed routinely but you have the right to refuse one. An ultrasound scan should only be considered if a woman suffers localized pain or complications for which a doctor or midwife cannot find a plausible reason. Such cases though are rare. As for now, ultrasound has been repeatedly shown to make no difference whatsoever to the outcome of a normal pregnancy.

Timeless

[This is an excerpt from the book 'Timeless Secrets of Health & Rejuvenation' by Andreas Moritz]

Andreas Moritz is a writer and practitioner in the field of Integrative Medicine. He is the author of 13 books ( http://www.ener-chi.com/book.htm ) on various subjects pertaining to holistic health, including The Amazing Liver and Gallbladder Flush, Timeless Secrets of Health and Rejuvenation and Cancer Is Not a Disease.

His most recent book is titled 'Vaccine-Nation: Poisoning the Population, One Shot at a Time'. Moritz is also the creator of Ener-Chi Art and Sacred Santémony.

Much of his life's work has been dedicated to understanding and treating the root causes of illness, and helping the body, mind, spirit and heart to heal naturally.

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