Wallace Eastwood

Review of Southtree

Just received my first order from Southtree. Sadly...

Just received my first order from Southtree. Sadly, it will be the last. the quality of the product did not come close to meeting the hype mentioned on the website.

My order was small - the digital scanning of fifty 35mm color slide transparencies. I figured that if the order turned out well, i would send in about 250 more. The website indicated my order would be processed by a skilled "technician" who would carefully scan and optimize each slide. Apparently the term "technician" is used loosely at Southtree.

The quality of the scanning work was seriously substandard. Some of the images that were sharply focused on the slide were seriously blurred - some to the point of being worthless. In some instances, focus was inconsistent on the same slide. Other slides were scanned backwards-something that would be obvious to a "technician" who was actually checking his/her work as each image was scanned.

The most serious deficiency was dust contamination. The slides that were returned to me were obviously cleaned of dust at some point. So it is unclear to me why there were so many dust spots on the finished scan files. Either the slides were cleaned AFTER the scan, or the scanning equipment, itself was contaminated. Many scanner manufacturers offer software that will mitigate much of the problem with dust spots. Southtree apparently doesn't offer this.

Quality of Work - POOR
Speed - POOR (It took two months to process the order)
Communication - OKAY (emails were sent to advise processing steps)
Recommendation to others - Find another vendor!