I want to scan my 35mm negatives

[Taz]

Is there an all-in-one super-dooper printer that can take negatives and scan them into JPGs for me?

I used to be an amateur photographer in the 80's and have thousands of photos taken with my Minolta Dynax 7000i (a very old 35mm SLR camera). I have the negatives as well and need a cost-effective way of transferring some of those photographs into the digital age.

What i'm after is a photo printer that has a slot for negatives and can either print or scan them for me.

My budget is around £500.

Any ideas?

[Flibb]

Its going to cost a lot to print that lot, I would suggest a dedicated neg / slide scanner then use an online printing service to print the bulk. I have a rather old minolta scanner, nikon also do some. You load the neg or slides in to a carrier then feed them in. If you can pick one up 2nd habd rthey tend to keep their price when you want to sell it on. Think I paid about £80 for my one, but it wsant ment to work with XP, bit of fiddling at it was fine.

[Taz]

Thanks, Flibb. I really want to scan them first - all of them! So pro-am quality scanning of the main priority. I think a dedicated film scanner is probably what I need but nobody seems to do them anymore.

[nichomach]

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=3LG3

http://www.jessops.com/Store/s35740/...s.aspx?&comp=y

http://www.jessops.com/Store/s36227/...s.aspx?&comp=y

[Flibb]

Some here http://www.fotosense.co.uk/shop_sub_...ryID=31&tabID=

http://www.parkcameras.com/ProductsL...c-c2c95d2689f2

http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/scanner/film_scanner_35_mm/

Might be worth asking in a proper photography forum, as they will have a bit more experience with them than me.

[Funkstar]

I'm sure someone else asked about negatives scanners on here a while back.

I think it was suggested that you can get them on eBay quite regularly, and that they hold their value quite well. You could always get one, digitise all your photos then sell it, that way the cost per scan is negligible

[snedger]

if you go visit Vincent Oliver on his photo-i.co.uk you can see some reviews he's done of flatbed scanners which he shows produce better results than some £5k professional negative scanners.
I've always been meaning to get one, but every time I'm about ready, a new scanner comes out and I baulk at the new premium price.

[Taz]

Some of the dedicated film scanners are very expensive. I've set my budget at £500 and have seen a couple that produce very good quality results (Nikon do one that i'm likely to get for around £470).

I don't want to spend more but the negatives I want to scan are fairly high quality photographs and were processed and developed by Colab (a Pro-Am lab that I always use). I'll want a scanner that will allow me to save the resulting files into a lossless format so that I can transcode to JPG in the future.

[Funkstar]

TIFF will probably be the best format to save as.

[Taz]

I found a good review site for anyone in the same boat as me:

http://www.ephotozine.com/equipment/...m?prodselect=2

[Taz]

Originally Posted by Flibb

Some here http://www.fotosense.co.uk/shop_sub_...ryID=31&tabID=

http://www.parkcameras.com/ProductsL...c-c2c95d2689f2

http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/scanner/film_scanner_35_mm/

Might be worth asking in a proper photography forum, as they will have a bit more experience with them than me.

I ended up ordering the Nikon Coolscan V from Park Cameras. Their price was the cheapest on the 'Net (£428) and included a special offer of free next-day delivery by City Link.

I wanted to stick with a name associated with photography and the reviews of the Nikon Coolscan V on various photography sites are very good.

So i'll be spending 2007 scanning all my negatives. I fear I may have to give Scan even more of my hard-earned cash by ordering a very big external hard drive to store all the TIFF images on!

Anyway, thanks for all the advice offered on here. Merry Christmas to everyone.

[Funkstar]

looks good.

I want to scan all of my familys photographs (including ones from grand parents and extended family) to create a bit on an archive. Would like to do it while most of the old ones are still in OK condition and people still remember who is in them or where they were taken.

That ephotozine link has reviews on flatbeds too, which i'll be taking a look at in the next few months i think.

[Taz]

I've spent the afternoon playing around with the Nikon Coolscan V film scanner. Setting it up took minutes but playing around with the settings can (and did) take a few hours.

I used a couple of negatives from 1992 when I was working in Seattle (WA, USA). I've done A-B scans of two different difficult photographs. The first is a nighttime shot at Seattle-Tacoma airport and the second is a shot of a friend in bright sunshine but with some very awkward shadows.

The first photo in each pair is a basic 8-bit scan with no processing (other than reducing the image in Paintshop Pro XI to a manageable size). The second shot in each pair is with a fair degree of post-processing enabled, in particular the removal of surface dust and scratches from the negative. The second image of each pair was also scanned at 14-bits.

The images might take a while to load.

First - a basic non-processed 8-bit scan of Seattle-Tacome airport at night:



The same scene with post-processing scratch and dust removal (and some other bits and pieces) scanned at 14-bits:



The second photograph is a daytime shot in bright sunshine with some 'difficult' shadow areas.

Firstly, a basic 8-bit scan with no post-processing:



Now the same photo with 14-bit processing and considerable post processing including shadow processing:



These scans were taken from negative film that is 14 years old! The original uncompressed TIF images were 70MB (8-bit scans) and 118MB (14-bit scans).

[jamena]

Originally Posted by Taz

II used a couple of negatives

...and how do you find the scans comparing to the original? If you got the above scans printed, how close do you reckon either comes to a print from the original 35mm? And how large a print do you think you'd get from the digital scan compared to the 35mm negative?



Interesting thread I started one ages ago on scanners, never quite bought one though, as I'm not sure I'd like to be spending that much, even if I can (apparently) get most of my money back on ebay (can't find any/many recent nikons for sale there) Currently I'm thinking that some of the midrange (£100-150) flatbeds seem to produce pretty good results but there's very few review sites that have enough reviews of both recent flatbeds and dedicated scanners to compare.

The scanner I want to get would have to be able to both bulk-scan lots of negatives, half taken with 35mm compacts and compact-zooms, but then my mum wants to scan in a lot of slides&negatives of artwork.

Main problem is I'm not convinced by the reviews that the dedicated scanners are that much better than a good flatbed anymore. I've also seem closeups of scans using ICE and not using ICE, and ICE (or other comparable technologies) seems to remove not only dust but also some small details within photos, so I'm not convinced it's a good idea either! Tough customer...

The Epsons are my current plan 3490 or 3590, or the 4490 perhaps for the better dynamic range...

[Taz]

Jamena, once i've scanned an appreciable number of negatives i'll be getting a couple of photographs printed out as A3 photos (i'll probably use a reasonable development lab like Colab).

I'll just send them the TIFF original (120MB file) and see how good the printed photographs are at A3 size. The picture sizes are approximately 5,500 x 3,500 pixels.

I seriously thought about an Epson A4 flatbed scanner that has a built-in strip-film adapter but I ended up buying the Nikon due to its relatively small size. I already have two flatbed scanners and a scanner built into my all-in-one HP printer.

The Nikon is very slow to scan the negatives (it 3-4 hours to do 36 x 35mm negatives). But, in my opinion, the results are well worth it.

In terms of quality it probably isn't better than the latest crop of flatbed scanners but its ergonomics were better for my requirements.

[jamena]

Originally Posted by Taz

The Nikon is very slow to scan the negatives (it 3-4 hours to do 36 x 35mm negatives).

yipes. I hope that's unattended 3-4 hours? Can you just stick in a batch of 36 negatives with what they sell you in the standard box and leave it to run (once you've sorted the initial settings or auto/defaults I suppose?) while you work (assuming it's not too noisy...)

ta for the info, very useful to hear from someone who's got one!