Slide/Negative Scanning

[football_taxi]

Do any of you guys/gals have any experience of negative or slide scanning, Ive looked at three options with regard to slides..

1st one of those tube things that clips on to your digital camera (cheapest)

2nd flat bed scanner with slide and negative adaptor

3rd dedicated slide scanner

im drawn to option two as it means ill also be able to scan printed photos aswell, but the ease of use that the dedicated scanner offers apeals aswell.


TIA

Mart

[ehasler]

What sort of quality output are you looking for? Some flatbeds (e.g., the top-end ones by Epson and Canon) give good results for slides, however they won't be *as* good as a (good) dedicated slide scanner.

Then again, what you lose in quality, you gain in ease of use (usually easier to scan more than one slide at once) and the ability to scan other formats (e.g., medium format film, or other photos/documents).

[steve11]

Mart

I have a Canon 9950f Flat bed scanner for 35mm and 6x7 slides, Quality is excellent (see attached review)

www.photo-i.co.uk/Reviews/interactive/Scanners/Canon_9950F/page_1.htm

Epson 4990 is also very good.

[406tm]

Oy Boy

I have a flat bed scanner here but there are no drivers for XP. May work with 2k as I am sure it works ok with NT. You can pick it up if you like.

[Joe911]

I have a Nikon Coolscan V ED.

www.europe-nikon.com/details.aspx?countryId=20&languageId=22&prodId=850&catId=97

It works very well - some of the processing to get rid of scratches/grain/dust works pretty well too. I'm sure it's not good enough for pro's - but I was very happy. The software has its peculiarities, but overall does the job well.

I've scanned in about 5000 negatives (12 years of snaps) with it for my web site and it automatically deals with yer standard strips of four - so I just had it scanning beside my desk while I worked and every few minutes I changed over the negative strip. Neat.

I scanned everything at 2000 dpi - easily good enough for web use, fine for modest size printing too. The scanner will go up to 4000 dpi.

>> Edited by Joe911 on Monday 30th January 16:47

[LongQ]

Epson 4990 here.

Photos are excellent, slides are fine - in fact a whole lot of less obvious detail can be picked out. I have not run so many slides through yet as I have been concentrating on negatives - colour and B&W 35mm and 120 size B&W. Much of it old though as I still use 35mm it gets a workout with every film I take.

Give it a good negative and the quality seem really excellent. Give it an average one and it will be very good to excellent.

Easy to use, take care with dust preparartion (as ever when scanning negatives in particular) and be prepared to buy a lot of disk capacity of you plan to archive stuff at top quality!

[HankScorpio]

I've got a CoolScan III and a Canon 8440.

Coolscan is better results (by some considerable margin) but requires substantial time and effort to get the best results, Canon is much faster and more convenient but not quite as good results.

I've been doing quick med res scans of everything I've got on the Canon and then marking those that warrant better treatment in the Nikon.

I aim to be finished around 2012....

[FrenchTVR]

I borrowed a friends Minolta dedicated negative/slide scanner, it was very good and quite quick. Sorry can't remember the model, but I was very impressed with it.

[sparkythecat]

steve11 said:

Mart I have a Canon 9950f Flat bed scanner for 35mm and 6x7 slides, Quality is excellent (see attached review) www.photo-i.co.uk/Reviews/interactive/Scanners/Canon_9950F/page_1.htm Epson 4990 is also very good.

steve, thanks for the link to the photo-i website. That's one of the most thorough product reviews I've ever read.

[football_taxi]

Thanks for the opinions, i think ill look at a flatbed with dedicated media carriers.

[LongQ]

football_taxi said:

Thanks for the opinions, i think ill look at a flatbed with dedicated media carriers.

I don't use the media mounts for 120 negs and slides - found it was easier mostly to work directly from the glass scanning the entire area and setting up marquees. The Epson software will retain the marquee definitions (including any specific adjustments) and allow them to be re-positioned for the next batch. The carriers sometimes seem to confuse the smart software that spots them, especially if any of the slide mounts are dark coloured.

No experience of the Canon so not sure if it is the same. I believe the Epson is faster by quite a bit but the Canon may just have the edge on quality. You would have to be very picky to choose between the two for most scans I reckon - and want to create some massive prints or greatly enlarge a very small part of the negative. Anything 'normal' won't show a noticable difference. IMHO.