Prints form your paintings - ideas needed please

Hi everyone, well the time has come to finally see about arranging prints of my paintings in hope to keep the originals and sell the prints online. Especially seeing that I have sold over 40 bird paintings over the past year! My partner and I have done quite a lot of research and can see that this may be worth while doing. What I do need to know though is how do you get your paintings reproduced? Do you scan/photograph your work and email it to companies such as salt-of-the-earth.biz or is it best (if possible) to take your painting into the company for them to scan? I checked this out with a local North Devon firm and they charge £25 for Giclee scanning and a further £20 per hour for colour balancing! This is going to be a very expensive project especially when I am after half a dozen paintings to be scanned! 8-) I have emailed a scanned copy of my recent Sparrowhawk to my local (small) company, to have a print produced from an emailed jpeg image. It will be interesting to see if the quality is acceptable enough to be able to sell the print online. If it is good enough then I will order a further 10 prints and see if they sell. I obviously intend on testing the water first! I can then use the same process for further prints, one purchased for a quality check then if all ok then another ten. These will be printed on Somerset Velvet Watercolour Paper. At least if this way works by simply scanning my own paintings and checking the quality by purchasing just the one to begin with online, it will save a lot of costs with the company scanning and colour proofing the image. I obviously have to make sure that the background of the scanned painting is white enough, otherwise with the prints being on a larger sheet of paper (A4 standard) I will end up with a very light grey box behind the painting. This is due to the scanner scanning the texture of the paper creating a sort of grey shade behind the painting. This can be removed with varied degrees of flood fill using Paint Shop Pro or PhotoShop, but time consuming. Bearing in mind that I paint in an illustrative way, so much of my background is the paper colour :-D What ideas do you have concerning passing on your images to printing firms? Do you email them your painting photo/scan or do you go to the costs of taking the original in to them to scan for additional costs? I know it all depends on the quality and I would sell anything that I wouldn't buy myself. Paul :-D