Scanner or scanner service for older prints

[LandCruiserPhil]

I have 100's of old 3"x5" , 4"x6", and 35mm negatives I would like to digitize. The only thread I could find is 3 years old and with most electronics Im sure available equipment has changed.

Im not a professional photographer but I would like a decent quality scanner that is not complicated to use and preserve my old photos.

What are my options for 2010?

 

[bucketosudz]

Phil,
I started a thread asking some of the same questions this Spring and got some really good suggestions. Since then I have purchased and have been very pleased with a Epson Perfection V500 with Digital ICE. I have scanned somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 color and b/w slides, that many or more of negatives as well. I was flabbergasted on how simple it has been for me. I had some slides that I thought were toast, Success! I have some photo's from the early 1900's and a tad later. I am not working on flat photos and documents.

At the same time I purchased a Minolta Dimage Scan Dual IV like new from a family. They had bought it to do some slide work, but as it turns out, they were the wrong format. Anyhow, I never did use it, it is currently in the box gathering dust. The Epson worked quite well for me.

FWIW- Do it, and do it NOW!! If you are securing family heirloom photo's you will find there are family you may not identify and will need others help. My Grandmother was developing Dementia and she had volumes of history, so I rushed at the first of the year to get them from her home. After I got them I proceeded to scan a fast as I had time for. Well long story short, she rapidly worsened and is now in a home. And to top it off all of my fathers Vietnam photos were in with the stuff also, he passed in March before I could have him tell me about them. Now I have literally a thousand scans and lots of questions.

Let me know where you go with your choice, if you should decide to do a slide specific scanner, I would be happy to send the Minolta mentioned earlier. Not sure what it would take to get it fired up, but I hear they are great as well. But they are only for slides. Just a thought.

 

[EuroJoe]

subscribing

cant advise but a friend also asked me the same thing

 

[ducktapeguy]

x3 on the Epson V500. I bought one a couple years and have been very happy with it. It will scan 35mm and 120 format, but i forgot what the max negative size it will scan, you may have to upgrade to the next level up (V700 I think?) for larger negatives.

I've been waffling on the purchase of a negative scanner for years, my only regret is that I should have gotten it sooner. It may not be comparable to a Nikon Coolscan (I don't have one to compare it to), but for about 1/10 the price I can live with slightly less resolution. Unless you're doing professional level photography, I am not sure if the difference in quality will be noticible to an average consumer.

Probably my favorite feature is the Digital ICE, which automatically eliminates most of the dust and scratches. I can't imagine having to go through each scan and touch up all the imperfections, it'll take years to get it all done. That feature does double the scan times, but IMO it's still worth it. I started out using the highest resolution (I think around 6000?) but quickly realized it was just creating huge 100MB files and taking forever to scan, without gaining much in return. After some fiddling, I think I settled on scanning at a lower resolution which kept the quality but made the files much smaller and faster. Most of my old pictures weren't taken with high end cameras anyway, so the loss isn't noticable. I think it still takes about 6-8 minutes per 35mm negative, but it's tolerable. I usually just scan with very minimal image processing during the scanning process, you can always do enhancements later with a better software.