Film/Negative Scanner

I have hundreds/thousands of 35mm negatives from my high school years to 2003 when I converted to digital. I'm wondering shat scanner be good to use to convert them to digital.

Thanks.

how much effort do you want to put into it and what are you willing to pay. A dedicated negative scanner does the best job but they can be costly. Some of the flatbed scanners, like the Epson v500, V600, V700 or the Canoscan 8800 do a fine job with negatives as well.

I got a new B&H catalog today and noticed a scanner for $90.00 that converts negatives to a 7.3mp file. Just wondering if it is worth it.

wysiwyg59 wrote in post #13338961
Just wondering if it is worth it.

That entirely depends on what you're looking for.

If you're looking for 600px long scans that tell you what the picture is and don't care about the quality, it will do a fine job. If you're looking for images on-par with today's digital cameras, it's going to be far less than adequate.

wysiwyg59 wrote in post #13338961
I got a new B&H catalog today and noticed a scanner for $90.00 that converts negatives to a 7.3mp file. Just wondering if it is worth it.

A 7.3 MP image will definitely not deliver the potential IQ of a negative.

I'd suggest you consider what you can afford, then find one that meets that limit.

The Minolta Dimage is a reasonably decent 35mm scanner and can be had used for $300 and under. It allows batch scans of 4 slides or 6 negatives. Scanning thousands of slides is a lot of work.

Here's an image of one they can found on Ebay. Make sure the auction includes everything. I had the II version and it worked fine.

http://www.bhphotovide​o.com …_DiMAGE_Scan_Du​al_IV.html

jetcode wrote in post #13339144
The Minolta Dimage i

I thought they discontinued that series quite some time back. Even your link shows as no longer available. Most i see online are sold as-is for parts and repairs.

Many dedicated film scanners which are NOT flatbed scanners were discontinued, like the Nikon line was one of the best, and they are no longer made.

Keep in mind that film scanning is quite time consuming per shot, and also is quite labor intensive in terms of cleaning and prepping each negative/slide!

It is a labor of love. I have been scanning my family pictures for the last 2 years on and off. I have several hundred restored. As wilt said, it is time consuming not only to scan them but also to restore them as some are in sad shape.

I have a Super COOLSCAN 9000 ED scanner. It does a great job but it didn't come cheap. From what I understand they are not manufacturing this anymore but you can still find them online. Have you considered sending your negatives and slides to a scanning service such as Scan Cafe. I know several people who have used this specific service and were very happy with the results.

I had National Camera Exchange scann our Hawaii pictures from 2000 and they charged us over $200 for 7 rolls. I thought that is high verses doing them myself

wysiwyg59 wrote in post #13342145
I had National Camera Exchange scann our Hawaii pictures from 2000 and they charged us over $200 for 7 rolls. I thought that is high verses doing them myself

Heh! I can certainly understand that -- I've got all my film negatives in shoeboxes buried in storage somewhere, and I don't entertain the idea of shelling out hundres of dollars on scanning the "keepers".

But, you do have to realize that you are paying for Time and, presumably for Quality delivered not just by the skill of the person but also the quality of the equipment used. You can figure time for a skilled worker can cost, say, $50/hr...

A good scanner will cost you several hundred dollars and months of work, if you're fast. Send them to scan cafe and pay to have it done, it's much more cost effective and much faster!

When I used scan cafe they sent the negatives to (I think..) India for scanning, and I was a bit worried about losing them in the mail, but I had no problems at all. I sent them in batches to be safe. You can actually see the image online and choose which ones you want and the resolution.

ShotByTom wrote in post #13343374
A good scanner will cost you several hundred dollars and months of work, if you're fast. Send them to scan cafe and pay to have it done, it's much more cost effective and much faster!

Fast|Good Quality|Cheap

Choose two .

I had the same problem and was going to use my HP 4800 scanner to get the job done. Job being to scan hundreds of color slides that contain my dads pictures of the family. The HP software was horible and the scanning process was so slow I about fell asleep waiting for the scans to complete. And trying to seperate the 4 slides from each other was hard for me to figure out.

I needed something simple and fast.

So I saw the ION Film 2 SD 35mm Flilm & Slide Scanner at Best Buy and bought one.

I was able to scan all my slides in two days and put them all onto a 2 GB SD chip. The scans are automatic and fast. They work great for displaying the pictures on a computer monitor. I'm not going to print them out so this works fine for my use.

I can import them into my computer and use photo shop elements 9 to edit them if I need to.

No computer is required to use this scanner.

It will also scan negatives as well as color slides. There is a slide feeder that will hold half a box of slides. All my dads pictures were taken back in the 1950's, 60's and 70's when I was young.

Just last month my mom's sister died. I was able to go though our family slides and find pictures of my aunt and her kids and husband. I was able to scan them into my computer and sent them to my cousins in Pennsylvania via Email. They had not seen these pictures in the last 40 years and were very happy to get copies of these pictures of their mom when she was young.

The resolution of the scans is 5 MP. Works with SD or SDHC up to 8 GB in size.

I was very pleased with the results.

The only problem I had was dust on the scanners light box. They include a cleaning tool that can be used to clean the dust off the inside of the scanner. But the dust keeps coming back. I guess the house needs some dusting again with a HEPA vaccume cleaner.

If you want to get the job done and don't need 600 dpi print out then I'd recommend this scanner.

Cost was a little over $100.