Digital film and slide scanners...

fitness1 · #1 07-10-2020, 04:11 PM

like a lot of old dudes I've got a lot of my best photography on these formats.

I'm looking at the sub 150.00 range and curious if anyone has experience/preferences.

Thanks in advance.

The Bard Rocks · #2 07-10-2020, 08:38 PM

I bought one that was sort of recommended, used it for a few shots and put it away - they were unrecognizable, truly awful. The mirror contraption for a flatbed scanner was no better for me. Since then, I have projected them onto a screen and used a camera on a tripod right behind the lens on the projector. Not as good as my old Minolta scanner (which they stopped supporting so, while perfectly functional with an old enough computer, it won't work on any of mine .

Jeff Scott · #3 07-10-2020, 08:39 PM

What formats?

I too, really need to get a scanner, but I have so many different film formats which makes it more difficult to find something suitable (35mm; various 120 roll film sizes; 2 1/4x3 1/4, 4x5, 8x10 sheet film; in C-41, E-6, K-14, and black & white negs) along with both color and black & white prints in a great variety of sizes: 4x6 through 20x24.

Birdbrain · #4 07-10-2020, 10:31 PM

I've been meaning to do this for decades. I bought an Epson flatbed, but got stalled with the complexity of the software. I've read that scanners work slowly, at best.

Do you have a good camera with a 1:1 macro lens? Then just buy a small lightbox, put your camera on a sturdy tripod and rephotograph your slides on the lightbox. Alignment will be critical, but once you get things right, it should go quickly. You camera won't have the dust correcting software of a scanner, so don't forget to clean the old film properly first.

This discussion just prompted me to buy a bracket to hold slides firm and straight before the lens. Nikon sold a bundle of these back in the day, and they're widely available on the used market.

fitness1 · #5 07-11-2020, 01:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff Scott

What formats?

.

All on 35mm film and slides.

I'm referring to something like this - there seems to be a lot of newer stuff on the market like it. https://www.amazon.com/KODAK-Mini-Di.../dp/B07JJBGG1D

I just have a point and shoot Sony digi cam, so the lightbox thing won't work.

Dru Edwards · #6 07-11-2020, 06:54 AM

Hey Todd, I took 1000 of my parent's slides to Costco 5-6 years ago and they converted them all to digital for me. I took it in 3 batches ... just to make sure things worked out well. It did.

dhalbert · #7 07-11-2020, 06:55 AM

Ten years ago I rented a professional Nikon slide and film scanner for a few days. It came with a stack-loader and good software to install. I was able to scan hundreds of slides in a few days. They came out fairly well -- not as a good as the original, but noticeably better than using the slide/film holder on my (good) flatbed scanner.

The Bard Rocks, you might check out VueScan here, which may support your older scanner on current machines: https://www.hamrick.com/. Many people like this software.

I have a friend who runs a scanning service. You can read about his choices of equipment here: https://www.lexphotoscan.com/our-tools.html

keith.rogers · #8 07-11-2020, 08:36 AM

I did a few with a slide attachment and it was excruciatingly slow. I ended up just boxing up stuff and sending it off. I have still done a couple large prints that I think are important - pro photos of ancestors I don't really want to send off, but all the travel stuff and snapshots I'm happy just to have digitized so I can sift and save/toss on the computer. I have a few more albums to do one of these days - probably when the wife retires it'll keep us busy for a bit.

Dirk Hofman · #9 07-11-2020, 08:42 AM

Send it to a professional scanning service. It takes expensive equipment, experience using it, and a fair bit of time to do this right.

tinnitus · #10 07-11-2020, 10:41 AM

If you're somewhat adept with computers and willing to put in some time, an actual flatbed scanner with a backlight feature for transparencies/negatives will give you noticeably superior results.

If my OLD Epson V700 exploded today, I'd replace it with the V600 for less than $250.
https://epson.com/For-Home/Scanners/...r/p/B11B198011

Early on, I tried a few of those little dedicated slide machines. You drop in a stack, walk away and come back to a few dozen images on your computer. The problems with those toys included lack of quality and the annoying tendency to crop edges off every image (both in portrait/landscape). They were all lower resolution than I like - grainy. And each brand added its own sub-standard "personality" to every batch I scanned (orange, greenish, garish contrast anomalies, or just plain dark and gloomy). Handy, yes. But horrible quality and I returned them.

Some slides I saw in the past done by Costco, Walgreen's were also cropped. That was then, and they may be different or better now.

Like I said, working with a real scanner will require some attention on your part to master it and achieve quality, high-resolution results that you control. But, to me, the effort was worth it, stepping into my home "office" (standing height desk) and knocking out another sheet of 12 slides several times a day. A real scanner will also scan documents and opaque images, and it'll come with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software that lets you scan printed text from other sources into documents you can manipulate with Word or whatever you use.

With an old school screen and projector, I had already pared 20,000+ slides of international family history down to "the Keepers" (my dad was a prolific artist and traveler with high quality SLR film cameras). The net result of my spending a couple rainy winter months on the project was 3,200 images that ended up on thumb drives. Besides, I keep a guitar on a stand right next to the desk, so I was able to practice/refine 'Castles Made of Sand' and 'Think We Better Wait Until Tomorrow' while the scanner ran.

My caveat with Epson scanners is their proprietary "ICE" technology promising to make things simpler and look better, it does not for me. I leave that box unchecked and specify my own dpi/color/light preferences. Intimidating? It shouldn't be. YouTube tutorials abound.

fitness1 · #11 07-11-2020, 11:50 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dirk Hofman

Send it to a professional scanning service. It takes expensive equipment, experience using it, and a fair bit of time to do this right.

This was where I was leaning for the best ones.......I don't want to put them in the mail, and the closest one to me is about 90 miles away from what I can tell.

I've got to buy some kind of a device so I can evaluate the quality, so it may be worth it to get a cheap reader with a screen so I can get a better idea which were the best.

yaharadelta · #12 07-12-2020, 09:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tinnitus

If you're somewhat adept with computers and willing to put in some time, an actual flatbed scanner with a backlight feature for transparencies/negatives will give you noticeably superior results.

If my OLD Epson V700 exploded today, I'd replace it with the V600 for less than $250.
https://epson.com/For-Home/Scanners/...r/p/B11B198011

Early on, I tried a few of those little dedicated slide machines. You drop in a stack, walk away and come back to a few dozen images on your computer. The problems with those toys included lack of quality and the annoying tendency to crop edges off every image (both in portrait/landscape). They were all lower resolution than I like - grainy. And each brand added its own sub-standard "personality" to every batch I scanned (orange, greenish, garish contrast anomalies, or just plain dark and gloomy). Handy, yes. But horrible quality and I returned them.

Some slides I saw in the past done by Costco, Walgreen's were also cropped. That was then, and they may be different or better now.

Like I said, working with a real scanner will require some attention on your part to master it and achieve quality, high-resolution results that you control. But, to me, the effort was worth it, stepping into my home "office" (standing height desk) and knocking out another sheet of 12 slides several times a day. A real scanner will also scan documents and opaque images, and it'll come with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software that lets you scan printed text from other sources into documents you can manipulate with Word or whatever you use.

With an old school screen and projector, I had already pared 20,000+ slides of international family history down to "the Keepers" (my dad was a prolific artist and traveler with high quality SLR film cameras). The net result of my spending a couple rainy winter months on the project was 3,200 images that ended up on thumb drives. Besides, I keep a guitar on a stand right next to the desk, so I was able to practice/refine 'Castles Made of Sand' and 'Think We Better Wait Until Tomorrow' while the scanner ran.

My caveat with Epson scanners is their proprietary "ICE" technology promising to make things simpler and look better, it does not for me. I leave that box unchecked and specify my own dpi/color/light preferences. Intimidating? It shouldn't be. YouTube tutorials abound.

+1 on the Epson V600, I did a ton of old family 35mm slides, and photos, excellent results.

Earl49 · #13 07-12-2020, 10:29 AM

I've scanned a few old slides for PowerPoint presentations using my aged HP G4010 flat bed scanner. We've also scanned a few old family photos. If I were trying to archive my photography collection at highest resolution, I would probably send it out to a service. The cost would force me to curate the collection.

MartinGibsonFan · #14 07-12-2020, 10:34 AM

I'm very interested.

I've got film and slides that need to be scanned.

Sounds like there are various alternatives, I'm looking at efficiency (speed) as well as quality. Course, we have to add price into the equation.

So, I want it fast, cheap and easy !!! HA HA HA have we heard that phrase before.

I can't imagine the Epson V600 is the only option, but at under $200 that seems like a nice possibility.

Outsourcing everything? I guess if it's really local so you don't have to mail everything in (with the anxiety of losing it in the mail, or at least that would be one of my worries).

I can't imagine that doing 20 rolls of film and 500 slides would be under $200 so the Epson might be a better consideration.

J

tinnitus · #15 07-12-2020, 04:05 PM

Another compelling argument for buying an actual flatbed scanner instead of a small dedicated 35mm slide scanner is digitizing print photos and negatives. A good buddy of mine got sick and died last year (at only 61 years old - way too young) right around the 40th anniversary of our hike up Mt. Fuji together in '79.

I was able to scan some photos of the event to share, but they were faded and the colors had all tinted to sepia-tone. Timely attention to scanning those pics maybe 20-25 years ago when I first thought about about doing it ("someday") might've saved the pics so they'd look better today. Had I bothered to keep the negatives with the prints, they would also be scannable and reversed to nice positive images - something you can do with the Epson and other brands.

This is about preserving memories after all.