hi , im looking form something to use that i can scan my own old negatives (perhaps 1000 ish ) none of the pictures are that great just old ' snaps ' were id like to have a digital copy , any recomendations ? i want something quick and simple (and not to expensive.. ) id also consider sending them all away BUT seems to be expensive and cant really find anywere for good value what do people suggest?
I think you can get rates of around 40p per image sent away, so that would be £400 or so... given I had 4 or 5 times as many to do, and being selective would be REALLY hard, I decided against this.
There's a class of "scanner" in the £100 or so ball park made by Veho, Rollei etc. They operate stand-alone and are not really scanners, but small 5mp cameras in a light box, scanning to a SD card. I bought a Veho one for around £80. On the plus side, they are really quick; I did around 80 in the first evening. On the negative side...
a) Kodachromes look vile, horrid green colour cast
b) Most colour negatives look pretty bad (there's absolutely no colour correction other than inversion going on, AFAICS)
c) In my particular case, there was light leakage on each image (dark areas on negatives, light areas on slides). This was easily enough to declare it faulty and send it back.
I then bought a Plustek 7500i (outdated model) with Silverfast SE Plus (around £180; over £200 for the latest I suspect). This does 35mm negatives and slides, and 126 slides (I think it would do 126 negatives with another slide carrier). The process is MUCH slower, as mentioned, a couple of minutes a slide is pretty good going. I tended to set it doing 4 or 8 repeat scans (cuts down on noise), then pop back in the next TV advert break and move on to another one.
Silverfast is/was really clunky, although the new version 8 (almost complete re-write, I think) may be better; it at least has the normal menus available, (File etc), rather than doing everything its own way.
On the plus side, Silverfast SE Plus and better versions have a Kodachrome setting which does produce good results. For colour negatives and non-Kodachrome transparencies (ie all film without silver in it), the extra infra-red scanning option is a real help in getting rid of dust. My slides in particular were 30-40 years old, viewd in the slide projector many times, and had pick up gallons of crud. I even found it worth using the masking option on the Kodachromes and black and whites to allow the infrared magic to work on the skies, where the dust shows up most, rather than doing millions of spot fixing in Aperture.
So, on the really plus side, for transparencies it works really well. I scan mostly at 2400 dpi for images I want (around 9mp), 1200 dpi for the place-holders (around 2mp).
On the negative side, it doesn't work so well for colour negatives (no pun intended). Silverfast is supposed to have film profiles that sort out the colour casts in the various different negative types, but it doesn't really work very well, as I've demonstrated in another post today. It looks like there is a solution but it requires Photoshop and a special colour negative plugin, and I don't have (or want) Photoshop. So I'm still looking for a good colour negative solution. I'm not saying it doesn't work at all, just that good results require a lot of tweaking in Silverfast and/or your favourite image editing software.
I've done a little scanning with the scanner on my printer, but not enough to say much. Scanning from prints gives far lower auality and more aging effects than from the slides and negs. However, dust is less of an issue!
IMHO however, having my slides and negatives on my computer rather than in the proverbial shoe and other boxes has made me much happier. The process has helped me learn so much about my own life, it's almost scary. Would you believe you could forget your first AND second SLR, and believe your 3rd was your first? There are worse things as well. It may be a lot of work, but I think it's better and much more rerding than just sending the whole lot away to a bureau!
because my scanning takes a lot of time ! but on the other hand - whilst the new one is scanning I'm PP'ing the previous one, so almost the same time as going through digital shots.
But in the news:- postal rates are going up for parcels so posting to a lab is going to be more expensive.
