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Digitizing film - what product or service do/did you use

Tue, 2007-10-09 14:38 — jdwxly

I have a bunch of my older stuff stored away in slide reels.  All of these are mounted in cardboard slide mounts.  What kind of product or service have you folks used to get these into the digital world?  I'd like to digitize them for safekeeping and sharing with other folks (like this forum).  My flatbed scanner (Epson Perfection 1260 Photo) has a slide illumination attachment, but I suspect the scan quality won't be as good as some other techniques or a dedicated slide scanner of some type.

 Dennis


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Tue, 2007-10-09 16:34 — tkpowell

Plustek Optic Film 7200

I bought one of these a couple months ago. I've probably scanned 300 slides/negatives so far with nary a glitch. Cost was $200. Actually better than the 5 year old Nikon LS1000 I had that went tits up. This link says the hi res scans have artifacts but I haven't found any at the size I'm working with (20 megabytes) http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1765491,00.asp The biggest problem I've had is with the condition of the slides, many of which were scratched, dirty and faded. All fixable with photoshop to some degree. Here's a page I created from slides taken in 1970-71 which were all in really bad shape. http://www.tkpowell.com/army/r&r/z1/index.htm --Terry
Tue, 2007-10-09 23:07 — islemann

You're a lucky man Mr. Powell.

What a great collection of memories you've been able to save. Now I'm going to have to get my slide case down from the closet shelf and see how well my HP 7100C works as a slide scanner.

Thanks a ton for yet another project.

 

Michael 


Wed, 2007-10-10 07:58 — tkpowell

Thanks Michael

I've never tried one of those flatbed/slide scanner deals. Might work out fine. I had a lot of fun doing the old army slides. Never intended to build a page but googling brought me into contact with a couple guys who knew a couple more guys and they all sent me old pics and then it was a no brainer to do it. Had a great time bs'ing with people I hadn't heard from for 36 years. --Terry
Wed, 2007-10-10 12:53 — keith

I have been scanning

I have been scanning negatives and slides using my HP flatbed scanner with mixed results. First of all, it is a lot of work to load negatives and/or slides into the adapter, and the scanner is *really* slow. It takes about five minutes to scan one negative image at 600dpi. 

Another problem I'm having is that the scanner sometimes does wacky things when scanning B&W images. I have screwed with the scanner settings but can't seem to find the magical settings group that works ideally. Here are a couple of images I scanned this morning, both from the same roll of film:

 

The above was scanned using 256 color gray output, which is okay except that I know I'm losing some gray shades. Unfortunately when I scan using millions of color output I get this:

In this particular case it actually makes for a sort of interesting effect. But usually it just sucks. I need to get a dedicated neg/slide scanner.