2364 Main

Building B

Philomath, OR

97370

(541) 609-6810

Convert Photo, Video & More to Digital

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Frequently Asked Questions

frequently asked questions

Will these play on my TV?

Our Movie Disks are designed to play on your TV through your DVD player. On the other hand, our Data Disks are designed to work on your computer. Some DVD Players can play the Data Disks, and there will yellow oval sticker with JPEG in the center of the oval if your DVD player is designed to play from a Data Disk. No sticker, no luck.

Most Windows computer can play a Movie Disk. Apple computers will not play a Movie Disk without special software. Whether you have an Apple computer or a Windows computer, we will get a movie that works for you!

May I drive to Oregon and drop off my videos to be digitized?

Of course! However, you must come to our processing center which is located at 125 Main in Philomath Oregon. It’s the old City Hall, and we occupy the first floor. We work odd hours, so please let us know when you’re coming so we can make sure to meet you.

How are you different, why should I order from you?

We strive to offer the best image quality, best price and best service available anywhere, and our customers agree. Check out or testimonials, prices and equipment pages for more information.

How is this possible? We are engineers with the backgrounds needed to create new scanning equipment which takes advantage of......

How should I package my slides (or photos)?

Group the photos or slides into stacks, and secure these stacks with rubber bands, baggies, envelopes, cling wrap or aluminum foil in such a manner that they are held tightly together.

Slides are particularly problematic, as it’s their nature to escape and travel about inside boxes. If you have a stack of slides held together with rubber bands that would come apart if you dropped it on the floor, it’s probably going to come apart inside the box during shipping. Limiting stacks of slide to 4 inches high and using two rubber bands to secure them works well. Slides are susceptible to damage if they are loose inside a box.

Photos travel safest in plastic bags, envelopes, or stacked up and held together with a rubber band. Most photos are not damaged by rubbing against each other during transit. However, some very old paper photos can be damaged in this manner, so use your best judgment. For these very old photos, a piece of padding between each photo ensures safe shipping. More info: SAFE SHIPPING or SHIPPING OPTIONS and PACKING TIPS

How does the ordering / shipping process work?

Here’s how the process works:

Organize your photos and slides as little or as much as you like. See our Organizing your Photos page.
Prepare your photos, slides, albums, negatives or VHS tapes for shipping to our scanning Facility in Oregon. See our PACKING TIPS page for more information.
Click a Place Order Button, and choose which service you want. You will be asked to choose options and later to enter your order information and return address. That’s it! We don’t require any money upfront.
You can pack and ship any way you want.
When you package arrives, we will send an e-mail letting you know.

When we complete the order, we will ship immediately, and send you an email. We will create and email an invoice at that time as well. You can pay the invoice with a credit card or send us a check.

Now that I have my disk, how do I see my digital images?Now that I have my disk, how do I see my digital images?

Video available at: https://dpsdave.com/after_order_complete_support-2/moving-images-to-hard-disk/ (Windows)

Apple instructions at: https://dpsdave.com/apple-how-to-copy-files-onto-your-hard-disk-for-mac/

How do I organize my photos to be most convenient for you?

Carousels are super safe way to ship slides but add to the price. However, leaving the slides in the carousels and letting us deal with it saves a vast amount of your energy. The same logic applies to photo albums ane slides in sleeves.

What is the best way to ship my photos?

We encourage UPS, but FedEx and DHL are acceptable alternatives. We discourage the US Post Office, as 0.8% of the parcels that enter the USPO system get lost. On the other hand, UPS domestic has less than a 0.01% loss rate. When UPS packages are insured and Adult Signature Confirmation upon Delivery is required, the loss rate is below 0.001%. Your box has a better chance of getting hit by lightning than getting lost!

What resolution do you use?

Our 6,000 DPI for slides is the highest resolution money can buy. Fine grain film used for slides back in the day had 5,000 “grains” per inch, so we digitize at 6,000 dots per inch to capture all the detail in the film. Scanning at a resolution that is less than the grain in the film creates jagged edges in the digital images, and we see that as being out of focus.

Prints were usually printed on papers with 600 grains per inch, or were digitally printed at 600 DPI, so we advise using our Hi Def print scanning service, which digitizes at 600 DPI. However, portraits printed in a photography studio or similarly high value photographs are exposed the fine grain papers, and our 1200 DPI digitizing service matches the fine grain papers.

Will I be able or rearrange the order of my digital images after I get the order back?

You will be able to change everything on a digital image that has anything to do with how your images are displayed on your computer. However, how your computer sorts and displays your images is determined by the setting on your computer, not the settings on the image.

Why does DPI matter?

Up to a certain point, DPI (Dots Per Inch) has a powerful influence on the quality of your digital image. A good, sharp original will look fuzzy if the digitizing process uses too low of a DPI setting. This is because the lower DPI setting makes the sharp edges slightly jagged, and we see that as out of focus. Therefore the DPI of the scanning process should be equal to or greater than the grain size in the original.

Years in business

10,843

Customers so far!

4,000

photos scanned every day

Tax Free

Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently asked questions list is often used in articles, websites, email lists, and online forums where common questions tend to recur, for example through posts or queries by new users related to common knowledge gaps. The purpose of a FAQ is generally to provide information on frequent questions or concerns; however, the format is a useful means of organizing information, and text consisting of questions and their answers may thus be called a FAQ regardless of whether the questions are actually frequently asked

Who We Are

Philomath, Oregon.

A small town in the coast range, next to Oregon State University. DpsDave is in the old city hall here. Built in 1932, it housed the fire and police departments.

Legend has it that once, desperados broke in and took the chief of police hostage. The old timers aren't real clear on why or what happened next. Small town values.

Small Town Values

Trust, respect & belief that work is good for you.

Horses on main street are rare, but are plentiful around town.

Our staff of 5 people work by these 4 rules:

- Get to work

- Get your game face on

- Get your job done

- Have a good time

Small town values: Mistakes are treated as opportunities to discover & fix problems, not employee problems. If we've made a mistake on your order, please call or write us, and see for yourself how this works!

Small Business

Enthusiasm, nimbleness, creating value.

DpsDave began in 2011, and has developed new technologies & processes which enable conversion to digital of all things photographic that is better and faster than any body else can do.

Better means that your digital photos and videos will be the best they can be.

Faster means that digitizing your digital photos and videos will be cost effective to you while allowing our workers to earn a living wage.

Our motto is to move fast, decide now, and get a little bit better every day. After a decade of those "little bit betters" we've become very good at this.

Frequently Asked Questions

The "FAQ" is an Internet textual tradition originating from the technical limitations of early mailing lists from NASA in the early 1980s. The first FAQ developed over several pre-Web years, starting from 1982 when storage was expensive. On ARPANET's SPACE mailing list, the presumption was that new users would download archived past messages through FTP. In practice this rarely happened, and the users tended to post questions to the mailing list instead of searching its archives. Repeating the "right" answers became tedious, and went against developing netiquette. A series of different measures were set up by loosely affiliated groups of computer system administrators, from regularly posted messages to netlib-like query email daemons. The acronym FAQ was developed between 1982 and 1985 by Eugene Miya of NASA for the SPACE mailing list.^[