Recently, the Kodak Gallery Scan Van arrived in Rochester and took up temporary residence in the parking lot just outside my office.

The Scan Van is here!

In case you didn't know, the Scan Van is a customized van equipped with high-speed scanners specially designed to turn those shoeboxes full of old prints into spiffy, new digital images. In addition to taking advantage of this service from the Gallery, I was curious about how it all worked so while they scanned a pile of my prints, I asked a whole bunch of questions.

Truc and Erine

The first thing I discovered is that while the ScanVan was being run by several people, only two of them had been on the job for more than a few days. Truc Nguyen from San Jose and Erine Sato from Louisville have been with the Van since it first hit the road in March of '07 but the other 'scanners' are local and only with the Van here in Rochester. Truc and Erine have driven the ScanVan over 15,000 miles from its 'birthplace' in Ohio, to Southern California, across the southern U.S. to Florida then up to the East Coast.  Aside from getting lost once, they've had no problems to report though it's scary and shakes when it gets windy. Along the way, Truc has gotten to see and take pictures of all sorts of things, both the usual and the unusual in the cities they've visited.

The Van has a bunch of 'scanning stations,' each equipped with a Kodak s1220 Photo Scanning System, a laptop and a wireless network card. The hardware all sits on shelves attached to the side of the van. An awning overhead shields the crew and the gear from sun and rain. Another shelf and display area attached to the back of the van provides a place for customers to organize their pictures. A small generator sits alongside and provides power for the whole operation.

Every morning, they set it all up and every evening, they take it all down again. Amazingly, it only takes about a half an hour. Everything stores neatly in special compartments inside the van.  When they're at an indoor location, like a mall, they leave the van there, but when they're at an outdoor location like here, they take it home for the night. On the road and around town, they get lots of smiles and waves and occasionally someone comes running their way to ask about scanning pictures and getting prints.

Since its launch in March, the Scan Van has scanned more than 700,000 images. On an average day in a busy location, each scanner does about 10,000 images, at about 2 seconds each. Most people seem to bring a few hundred images, but some people really get into it. Truc had a single customer bring in over 10,000 images. When they get really busy, the images just fly through the scanners, but when things slow down, they actually get a chance to see some of the pictures streaming by. Occasionally they're surprised by what people bring in but also equally amazed by some of the pictures, particularly shots of wildlife from photo safaris.

I was primarily interested in the logistics and the technical aspects of the Van but I hadn't realized the powerful emotional impact the Van and its crew could have. Truc related story after story of how enthusiastic and excited people had been. Some were actually moved to tears as their images were scanned and restored using the Perfect Touch algorithms, revealing details never seen or long forgotten. When you see images by the hundreds streaming by day after day, it's surprising to see how important a single picture can be to someone who remembers the day it was taken or suddenly discovers a hidden detail in a picture they've known all their lives.

If the Scan Van comes to your town, be sure to stop by to say hello, digitize some memories and maybe make a few new ones while you're there.

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