We hired Sarah Merians for our wedding in September 2008. We had a terrible experience that culminated in us successfully suing the company in small claims court.
Below is a summary of some of the problems we encountered.
1. The photographer's assistant didn't bring a camera to the wedding, so we had one photographer instead of the two that were promised. 2. The DVD was delivered late and one copy was defective. When we asked to have it replaced, they delayed for almost two months before telling us that they no longer work with the videographer, couldn't provide another copy and might not even be able to recover the raw footage. Eventually, they recovered the footage but wanted to charge us $600 to convert it to DVD (even though they were supposedly giving us the raw footage to make up for not being able to provide the edited version). We refused and they sent us the footage in its original format (small tapes) which we will now have to convert ourselves. 3. Our actual photographer was nice but her pictures weren't very good. In retrospect, she was disorganized on the day of the wedding and didn't make sure to take a lot of pictures with the key participants (for example, there are only a handful of pictures with my father). 4. Our wedding album doesn't look very good. A number of the pictures are pixilated and look like they were printed on a home printer. 5. After the wedding, the company refused to give us the high resolution digital images of our wedding pictures that were included in our contract. We fought with them for months and the employees refused to put us in touch with the owner, Sarah Merians. When we finally spoke to Sarah, she was extremely nasty and made it clear that she only cared about extracting as much money from us as possible. Ultimately, she said that she would only give us the high res images if we paid her an additional $1,500. Because they had almost lost our video footage, we were worried that if we let any more time pass, we would never see our pictures. So, we paid the money and then sued to get it back.
Needless to say, I would avoid Sarah Merians.