Scanning negatives to digital

I have probably thousands of negatives of years of photography and I want to maintain digitals of them. How costly is it to do this? Is the quality worth it?

Any other ideas would be appreciated.

Is the quality worth it?

Worth what?

In order to maintain digital files, first you are going to have to scan them, and then store them, typically in multiple places or with multiple media. When you store them, you have to decide whether they will be online and available, or off-line and in a safe someplace.

We don't know what size the negatives are to begin with. Scanners for some sizes are relatively inexpensive, and others are costly. Unless you have high-end scanners, it takes quite a bit of time, and operator time does not come cheaply.

I have about 75GB of scanned 35mm slide images, so I've been down this road.

---Bob Gross---

I have scanned loads of negatives and to my mind it has been worth it. I would suggest that an external hard drive may be a good idea for storage. I don`t have the most powerful PC and sticking loads of scanned images on it definitely slowed it down.
I use a Nikon IV ED scanner and I am very happy with the results from negatives. It takes about 15-20 seconds to preview the negative, to see if it may be worthwhile scanning, and then about 90 seconds to scan it. This is without any adjustments which I have done later in Photoshop. Not sure whether it is the right way to do it but it works for me.
There is a feature on the Nikon scanner, and probably others, called ICE which is very helpful in that it removes any marks/scratches on the negative. No I do not work for Nikon !
Strangely I have had more problems with slides which I thought would have been easier. I suspect it may be preferable to do all the colour/brightness/cont​rast etc on the scanner rather than leave it to Photoshop. The ICE application is not recommended for slides so the slides have to be pristeen/dust free. Even then any dust/marks may be cloned out in Photoshop.
Bought my scanner on eBay from a very nice chap in Lexington with a view to scanning and then reselling. However as the previous post mentions it does take some time.
Hope this helps.

What resolution do you need? This was my cobbled solutionfor 6MB "scans".

Thanks everyone. I have 35mm slides and negatives that I want to preserve in digital. I even went out ot purchase a 250GB drive for my new digitals (RAW) and now looking to convert my negs over. Appears this is going to be a lengthy process.

I am currently nearing the end of transfering about 3500 slides to digital. The process is simple enough, however the time involved is quite long. I am using a Nikon 5000 ED with slide feeder, the resultant images a at 4000dpi 16 bit/pixel in TIFF format, about 120 MB per image. The JPEGS are about 5MB an image.
I can get through about 240 images in a 9 hour day. Slides dont require alot of bit diddling so they go pretty fast. Negative needs more care but is still pretty quick. The quality of the TIFF files is excellent and they can be pushed around quite a bit to modify or fix them.
The equivlant megapixels to a camera is about 20MP at 48bit. One big drawback is only about 40 images per DVD. but DVD's are cheap so not really a problem.

TwoBit, You appear to be the very chap that can help me please. I too am using a Nikon scanner but the IV ED instead of the 5000. I have had no problems whatsoever with negatives but would appreciate any help you could give me re ; slides.
I have been advised not to use the ICE feature on slides which means they have to be spotlessly clean for a start. I have also found that the colours on a scanned slide seem to be very saturated.
Any advice would be much appreciated.