Commercial and institutional customers have different needs than our customers scanning family photo collections. We understand this and we can provide the extra support and services neded to make complex digitization projects successful.

We have worked with commercial and institutional organizations from across the US and Canada. Our commercial clients include artists, photographers, doctors, dentists, legal services firms, financial services companies, clothing designers and manufacturers, and archival preservation companies. Institutional customers include public and private schools, libraries, teachers, museums, professors, historical societies, universities, airports, and the Department of Defense.

Benefits of Working with Pixmonix

Security: All of our work is done in our offices in one location in Hillsboro, OR. Your slides, negatives, photos, video and film are only in the hands of our technicians or FedEx/UPS while they are out of your offices. We do not outsource any of our scanning or conversion work to India or Costa Rica like our competitors. We have a very secure, controlled environment with very limited access. Your materials are safe with us.

Results: We get great results. Though we process hundreds of thousands of scans each year, we are small firm relentlessly focused on providing great results. Images that we produce are consistent, high quality, and uniformly treated. This is difficult to achieve if you are doing a few images at a time over an extended time period or using employees that are temporary or primarily dedicated to other tasks. Our people are very experienced with producing great quality digital images from scans and digital video from film and video tapes. Our goal is to provide you with digital images and video that you can use without any further work

Value: We include everything that you need to have useful images right off of the DVD or hard drive - including careful cropping, color and exposure correction and generation of any required JPEG images. We will structure our processes in a way that is catered to your use. This includes producing files that do not need additional image processing for your uses, generating files in the formats and forms that you need and delivering the images on media that make sense for you. All of this catering is included in our base pricing.

Speed: We can complete a large scanning effort in a fraction of the time it would take a single person to do the work (or the time that our competitors take to ship your slides overseas for processing). We employ multiple technicians and a large pool of scanners and computers to do the work. We have optimized our systems for both quality and speed. We generally have no waiting time - when we receive your materials we start working with them immediately. This minimizes the time that the materials are out of your hands.

Focus: Converting your media to digital is our focus. We have developed systems to make us efficient and economical while still getting fantastic quality. Our technicians are trained to do nothing other than convert and process images, video and film to digital. We have a large number of scanners and computers to execute the conversion to digital and processing quickly and efficiently. This is very difficult to reproduce without a sizable investment of time, effort and money.

Flexibility: We cater our work to your specifc needs. We want to do the things that make your life easier. Please let us know how we can do this. Some examples include:

• File types: The type and number of digital image files we return to you is determined based on your specific needs.
• Color spaces: The color spaces of the digital images can be catered according to your existing digital asset practices and current needs.
• Sharpening: We can cater the image sharpening that we do based on the intended usages of the digital images.
• File naming: We can name digital files according to your desires, including per-image naming.
• Reference prints: Custom generated and printed contact sheets or other printed references are available.

Digital Image File Format Considerations

We can return digital images in TIFF, JPEG and/or other formats to your specification. We can return multiple file formats (e.g., JPEG and TIFF), or multiple versions of a file (e.g., full-size and reducd resolution files). TIFF files can be losslessly compressed (using LZW or ZIP compression) to reduce file sizes by ~10%-30% (depending on the image). JPEG files can be compressed to varying degrees according to your goals. We will work with you to determine the best formats for your project. We normally return TIFF images in the AdobeRGB color space and JPEG images in the sRGB color space. We can cater these choices to your needs.

We are happy to return images on an external hard drive. We can purchase the drive(s) on your behalf or you are welcome to send drives to us. Drives can be formatted for Mac or PC, and may use firewire, USB, or eSATA interfaces. Images can also be returned on data DVDs. The DVDs that we use are the “archival-quality” Gold DVDs from MAM-A. With TIFF files or a large quantity of JPEG files, this quickly becomes cumbersome.

If you have other requirements for the digital image files resulting from your project, please let us know.

Film and Digital Image Security

We understand the importance of your film and video to your organization or business.

We do all of our work within one office suite in Hillsboro, Oregon. We have very limited access to work and storage areas of our facilities and a small number of employees. We never ship your materials overseas. For large projects, we dedicate the facility to the processing of the materials; this provides better turn around times and improved organization and security.

We use UPS or FedEx for return shipment. We always repack film and other materials appropriately for safe shipping. We require signatures on delivery and utilize all available insurance and tracking mechanisms for return shipments. In all of the shipments we have done with UPS and FedEx (both inbound and outbound), we have not had a lost or damaged package.

Additionally, we hold the raw and processed scanned digital images and video on our servers after returning materials to you. Our storage servers are not accessible from the Internet and use redundant storage mechanisms to avoid problems due to hardware failures. These factors provide an extra level of assurance that your images and video will not be lost due to problems in transit (though this has never happened).

Delivery Times

We offer a lot of flexibility to meet your needs. We can return thousands of images each week, or we are happy to work on projects over longer periods. Our resources are highly scalable for large projects. When you have determined specific goals and schedules for your project, we will work with you to develop a digitization timeline that meets your targets.

Metadata Entry

We can provide meta data entry services for your organized and annotated materials. This can take many forms including date and keyword tagging using IPTC data. If you would like to explore this, please contact us to discuss so that we may understand your goals and how we might help you meet them.