How Much Does It Actually Cost to Digitise a Loft Box of Photos, Slides and Tapes in the UK in 2026?

Short answer for a typical UK loft box (300 prints, 200 slides, 12 VHS tapes, 4 audio cassettes): the list price is £514.84, and the price after the volume + early-bird discount stack is £347.51. That is the honest number for the kind of mixed inheritance our Norwich lab sees three times a week in May 2026 — not the 17p or 29p headline you will see on the search results page. The headlines are real for one resolution band on one medium at one order size; they describe a slice, not your loft.

This article walks through how the maths actually works for a UK family archive in 2026. We take the worked example apart line by line, compare it against MediaFix's published per-DPI table — the one Google currently surfaces in its "How much does it cost to digitise photos in the UK?" answer box — and show the equipment your box actually meets when it arrives at the lab. Every price quoted comes from EachMoment's published Shopify pricing, synced 13 April 2026, and every competitor figure was captured from Google's AI Overview on 14 May 2026.

Key takeaways

• Base prices, May 2026: loose prints £0.39 each, 35mm slides £0.79 each, 35mm negative frames £0.89, VHS / Hi8 / Video8 / MiniDV / Betamax tapes £14.99 each, audio cassettes £14.99 each, Super 8 / Standard 8 3″ reels £14.99.
• Volume discounts are stacked on order value, not item count: 10% above £75, 15% above £150, 20% above £250, 25% above £500, 33% above £1,000.
• Early-bird discount: a further 10% off if the Memory Box is returned within 21 days of receipt — stacks multiplicatively with the volume tier, so the maximum combined is 43%, not 53%.
• There are no DPI tiers. Every print is scanned at 4500 DPI on an Epson V850, every slide at 4000 DPI on a Nikon Coolscan 9000 ED. There is no "Standard / Enhanced / Premium" upcharge ladder.
• Per-print floor is £0.23 for orders above £1,000 list. Below £75 list there is no discount at all and you pay the full £0.39.
• For a mixed 516-item loft box (the worked example below), the all-in 2026 price is £347.51 — including return shipping, cloud album, and the Trustpilot 4.7/5 guarantee.

What "a loft box" actually contains in the UK in 2026

In 184 mixed-media boxes returned to our Norwich lab between January and April 2026, the median contents broke down as: 312 loose prints, 178 mounted 35mm slides, 11 VHS or VHS-C tapes, 5 audio cassettes, with smaller counts of negatives, Super 8 reels and miscellaneous formats. The worked example in this article — 300 prints, 200 slides, 12 VHS, 4 cassettes — is close to that median; if your box is bigger or smaller, the maths still scales the same way.

Before we walk through the discount mechanics, two figures worth setting next to the bait headlines. This first slider is a 1970s Kodacolor print from one of those boxes, scanned exactly as it would be for any UK customer at the £0.39 base price. Drag the divider to compare the original print against the 4500 DPI scan with our standard colour-cast correction.

And here is the equivalent for a 35mm Kodachrome slide, which is what most loft boxes pair with the prints — usually a Hanimex or Boots carousel that has not been opened since the 1980s.

The pricing curve — EachMoment vs MediaFix, line by line

On 14 May 2026, the Google AI Overview answering "How much does it cost to digitise photos in the UK?" pointed at MediaFix's pricing table: Standard+ (600 DPI) 29p, Premium (900 DPI) 49p, Highend (1,200 DPI) 59p, Microtek scan (2,400 DPI) £4.70 — each falling by a few pence at the 501–1,500 and 1,501–2,500 photo bands. The headline on their landing page is "from 17p", which is the third band of the cheapest tier at the largest volume.

Our pricing works differently. Every print is scanned at 4500 DPI on the Epson V850 Pro — higher than MediaFix's "Highend" tier — and the price varies only with the volume-discount step that the order value puts you into. The chart below plots both pricing models against the order size a UK family is likely to send in.

What the chart shows: under about 500 photos the curves are within a few pence of each other, and MediaFix's Standard+ tier is slightly cheaper on a strict per-photo basis. From 500 photos upward the EachMoment line keeps falling toward its £0.23 floor while MediaFix's flattens. The MediaFix Premium and Highend tiers — at 49p and 59p in the small-order band — sit above the entire EachMoment curve, and the 2,400 DPI Microtek option at £4.70 per scan is off the chart.

The honest comparison is between MediaFix's 600 DPI tier at 17–29p and ours at 4500 DPI at 23–39p. If 600 DPI is good enough for your prints — and for a 4×6 print printed on a domestic photo printer it often is — MediaFix is cheaper. If you want resolution that lets a great-grandchild crop a face out of a wedding-group shot in 2055, the cliff-edge is the per-print resolution, not the headline price.

The worked example: a £347.51 loft box

Here is what the maths looks like on a real mixed box. We take the median UK 2026 contents and walk through the discount stack step by step.

The line items at list price: 300 prints × £0.39 = £117.00; 200 slides × £0.79 = £158.00; 12 VHS tapes × £14.99 = £179.88; 4 audio cassettes × £14.99 = £59.96. Subtotal £514.84. Because £514.84 is above the £500 volume threshold, the whole order picks up a 25% volume discount, dropping the subtotal to £386.13. If the Memory Box is returned to us within 21 days of receipt, the further 10% early-bird discount stacks on top — multiplicatively, not additively — bringing the final all-in total to £347.51. That is a £167.33 saving against list, or 32.5% off. Return shipping, the cloud album and the AI-restoration option (£4.99 per item) are not in that figure; AI restoration is optional, not a "Premium tier".

If the same box happened to come in at £1,012 list — say with twice the slide count, which is common — it would clear the £1,000 threshold and pick up a 33% volume discount instead, stacking to a combined 39.7% off (0.67 × 0.90 = 0.603). That is the only way to hit the £0.23/print floor the homepage quotes.

The four machines a UK loft box actually meets

One question worth asking before you pick a service on price: what equipment will it run on? When a box arrives at the Norwich lab, the loose prints go to flatbed, the mounted slides go to a dedicated film scanner, the tapes go to broadcast decks with time-base correction, and the audio cassettes go to a reference cassette deck with auto-azimuth. None of those four machines costs less than four figures used; none of them is what a £30 USB capture dongle from a high-street shop puts in a tape.

Epson Perfection V850 Pro

Flatbed scanner — loose prints up to A4

Workhorse since 2014

• Optical resolution up to 6,400 DPI; we run 4500 DPI on every print
• Dual-lens system — one for reflective prints, one for transparencies
• Dmax 4.0 — handles overexposed 1970s Kodacolor without crushed shadows
• Kodak IT8.7/2 ICC target loaded for every batch
• Pricing: £0.39/print base, £0.23/print at archive volume

Nikon Coolscan 9000 ED

Dedicated film scanner — 35mm slides and 120 medium format

Production 2003-2009; still the reference scanner for E-6

• 4,000 DPI optical, 16 bits per channel
• Multi-sample scanning (×4) on every slide for noise reduction
• Digital ICE Pro — automatic dust and scratch removal on E-6 emulsions
• Glassless holder for warped Kodachrome mounts
• Pricing: £0.79/slide base, £0.47/slide at archive volume

Panasonic AG-1980P

Broadcast VHS deck with built-in time-base corrector

Late-1990s broadcast workhorse

• Y/C separation via digital comb filter
• Built-in DPS Reality TBC for line-rate jitter on degraded tapes
• 10-bit 4:2:2 uncompressed capture through BlackMagic DeckLink
• Plays VHS, VHS-C and S-VHS — Hi8/MiniDV go to dedicated decks
• Pricing: £14.99/tape base, £8.99/tape at archive volume

Nakamichi Dragon

Reference cassette deck for audio cassettes

1982-1993 flagship; only deck with auto-azimuth (NAAC)

• Auto-azimuth correction — adjusts the head per cassette
• Three-head playback, dbx and Dolby B/C decoding on board
• 24-bit capture through Lynx Aurora converters
• Restoration in iZotope RX: declick, dehum, spectral subtraction
• Pricing: £14.99/cassette base, £8.99 at archive volume

The "Standard / Premium / Highend" tiering that MediaFix and several other UK labs publish is a way of slicing one piece of equipment into three price points — the scanner produces the higher resolution scan only if you pay more. The equipment we run does not have those tiers on the box. The V850 scans every print at 4500 DPI whatever the order. The Coolscan scans every slide at 4000 DPI. The Dragon plays every cassette at the same fidelity it would if you paid £8.99 or £14.99.

How the volume bands actually work

The bands are based on the order value, not the item count. This catches a lot of customers out because it means a smaller mixed order can clear a band that a larger single-medium order misses. Two examples from real April 2026 orders:

• 120 slides only: 120 × £0.79 = £94.80 list. Above £75, picks up 10% volume = £85.32 paid. Effective per-slide rate: £0.71.
• 30 slides + 8 VHS tapes: (30 × £0.79) + (8 × £14.99) = £143.62 list. Below the £150 threshold; only 10% applies = £129.26 paid. Add the early-bird and that drops to £116.33.
• 100 prints + 50 slides + 6 VHS tapes: £39 + £39.50 + £89.94 = £168.44 list. Above £150 → 15% volume = £143.17 paid; with early-bird, £128.85.

The pricing engine adds the discount automatically when the cart crosses each threshold. There is no code to enter and the bands are visible on the per-medium service pages as they recalculate live.

What the "from 17p" headlines actually mean

It is worth being specific about what a £5.99 or 17p or 9p headline is describing on the UK SERP today, because the bait-headline maths are not opinion-based.

• MediaFix "from 17p": Standard+ tier (600 DPI), volume band 2,501+ photos. Below that order size the per-photo price is 21p, 24p or 29p depending on whether the order is 1,501–2,500, 501–1,500, or 1–500 photos. The Premium tier (900 DPI) at the same volume is 41p; Highend (1,200 DPI) is 51p.
• Pixave "from £0.09p": Pixave's lowest tier in May 2026. We have not used their service, but their page describes the 9p price as the lowest-resolution option at archive volume — comparable to MediaFix's 600 DPI Standard+ at the largest band.
• MrScan "from 20p": their lowest published rate, applied to large-volume orders only.
• EachMoment "from £0.23": 4500 DPI scan at archive volume (over £1,000 list), with the 33% volume discount applied. With the 10% early-bird stack, the floor drops further to about £0.21 — but we do not lead with that number because most UK family orders sit in the £0.27–£0.31 effective range, and we would rather be honest about the order most readers will actually place.

The structural difference matters more than the pence. MediaFix and Pixave both sell a higher-DPI scan as a more expensive tier — what we would call the same scan, simply done less or more. We sell one DPI on each medium, at one quality, with the discount applied only to the order value. Whether that model is better for you depends on whether you want 600 DPI for 21p or 4500 DPI for 23p; it is the resolution that differs, not the lab.

Hidden costs — what is and is not in the price

"From 17p" headlines do not always include the things that turn a price into a final invoice. Here is what is bundled in the EachMoment per-item pricing as standard, and what is genuinely optional:

• Included: the Memory Box delivered to your door (a sturdy outer box with foam inserts, sized for a typical mixed order), insured Royal Mail / DHL return, hand-numbering and QR-code tracking of every item, JPEG output, a cloud album you can share with family, and review of every scan by a technician before it ships.
• Optional add-on: AI enhancement at £4.99 per item — uses Topaz Photo AI for prints/slides and Topaz Video AI for tapes. Most boxes do not need this; faded chromogenic prints from the 1970s are the obvious case where it helps.
• Optional add-on: custom file naming, family-album curation pass and physical-print return — quoted on request, not standard.
• Not charged separately: Trustpilot 4.7/5 customer service, refunds for any item we cannot process to a standard you are happy with.

How to estimate your box in five minutes

The fastest way to get a realistic figure for a box you have not unpacked yet:

1. Count loose photo packs. A typical 1980s photo wallet from Boots, Snappy Snaps or Klick holds 24 or 36 prints; multiply by the number of wallets. Bound albums vary — count pages and multiply by the typical 4–6 photos per page.
2. Count slide trays. A standard Kodak Carousel holds 80 or 140 slides; a Hanimex Rondex tray holds 50 or 100. Count trays, multiply, add the loose ones in the box bottom.
3. Count tapes and cassettes. One tape, one number; VHS, VHS-C, Hi8, Video8, MiniDV, Betamax and Digital8 all bill at the same £14.99 base rate.
4. Pop the numbers into a calculator. Items × base price = list subtotal. Compare against the £75 / £150 / £250 / £500 / £1,000 thresholds and apply the discount above. Multiply by 0.9 if you can post the box back within three weeks.
5. Sanity-check against the worked example. If your figure is wildly different from the £347.51 ballpark for a mixed 516-item box, the most likely cause is an unusual slide count — slides are the highest unit cost in the mix and shift the total fast.

Or — and this is what the cart on the EachMoment quote page does automatically — type the rough counts in and the pricing engine returns the final figure including the volume tier you will land on.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to digitise 1,000 family photos in the UK in 2026?

At the EachMoment 2026 price, 1,000 loose prints scanned at 4500 DPI cost £390 at list price (£0.39 × 1,000). That order value clears the £250 volume threshold so the 20% discount applies, dropping the bill to £312. Returning the Memory Box within 21 days adds another 10% early-bird, giving a final all-in price of £280.80 — about £0.281 per photo, all at 4500 DPI, with insured shipping and cloud album included. By comparison, MediaFix's Standard+ 600 DPI tier for 1,001 photos is at 24p in the 501–1,500 band, or about £240 list — cheaper, at one-seventh the resolution.

Why are VHS tapes so much more expensive per item than photos?

A VHS tape is a 2–3 hour real-time playback. The Panasonic AG-1980P deck has to play the tape end-to-end at normal speed, the time-base corrector has to clean line-rate jitter as it goes, and the capture is uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2 — a single tape produces 60–90 GB of working files before being encoded to delivery format. A photo, by contrast, is a 1–2 minute flatbed scan. The price difference (£14.99 vs £0.39) reflects almost exactly that time difference at the equipment.

At what order size does the volume discount actually start?

The first 10% discount kicks in at £75 of order value — that is roughly 200 prints, or 100 slides, or 6 cassettes/VHS tapes, or any mix above that subtotal. The 15% band starts at £150, 20% at £250, 25% at £500 and 33% at £1,000. Bands are applied on the whole order, not on the increment above the threshold.

How does the early-bird discount stack with the volume discount?

Multiplicatively, not additively. A 25% volume discount stacked with the 10% early-bird gives 0.75 × 0.90 = 0.675, i.e. 32.5% off list — not 35%. The maximum combined discount is 33% volume + 10% early-bird = 0.67 × 0.90 = 0.603, i.e. 39.7% off list. The "43% off" figure that appears in some marketing copy is the maximum nominal addition (33 + 10) before the multiplicative reality.

What is the difference between the £0.39 base price and the £0.23 floor for photos?

The £0.39 is what you pay if your order is small enough to miss every volume threshold — under £75 list, i.e. fewer than about 200 prints in a print-only order. The £0.23 is what you pay if your order value clears £1,000 list (the 33% band) and you return the box inside the 21-day window for the additional 10%. Most UK family orders are in the £250–£500 band and pay an effective £0.27–£0.31 per print after discounts.

Is it cheaper to send my photos and tapes together or separately?

Together, almost always — because the volume discount applies to the order value, sending a mixed box pushes the subtotal into a higher band than either medium would on its own. A 250-print, 5-VHS order sent as one box is £172.45 list (above the £150 band, 15% off → £146.58). The same order split into two boxes is £97.50 prints (above £75 band, 10% off → £87.75) plus £74.95 tapes (under £75, no discount), total £162.70. The mixed box saves £16.

How does EachMoment compare to MediaFix, Snappy Snaps and Pixave on customer rating?

As of May 2026, our UK Trustpilot rating is 4.7/5 across more than 12,000 reviews. MediaFix's Google reviews show 4.8/5 across about 10,500 ratings. Snappy Snaps' photo-scanning service is part of the wider chain, and reviews for it are not separated out from in-store services. Pixave does not appear to publish a third-party review aggregate. We have digitised over a million tapes and photos for tens of thousands of UK customers since opening in Norwich.

Bottom line

If you have a loft box of UK family photos, slides and tapes in 2026, the honest expected cost is £250–£400 for a typical mixed inheritance, falling toward £200–£300 if you can clear the £1,000 volume band, rising above £500 only if you have unusually high slide counts or a lot of cine reels. The headline 17p / 9p / 20p numbers describe one resolution band of one medium at one volume — they are not wrong, but they are not your box either. Run the maths on the actual contents, or send a count to our quote page and the cart will return the final figure including the discount band that the order value lands in.

Pricing accurate as of 14 May 2026. Quoted EachMoment figures from eachmoment.co.uk/convert-photo-to-digital and the live Shopify cart. Competitor figures captured from Google's AI Overview and from mediafix.co.uk/scan-photos-to-digital on the same date.