Scanning slides and negatives

[rusty_tlc]

We have boxes of old slides and negatives from back in the days when we used this quaint stuff called "film". My wife would like to get some of the pictures converted to digital format. I'd also like to scan in my Dads old B&W pictures.

Any recommendations on a good piece of equipment to do this?

 

[matt s]

Dedicated film scanners are getting harder to find. Nikon made (makes?) a good one. I had an acer film scanner for some time and it worked well but it was time consuming to say the least.

Anymore I generally tell people that their best bet for the money is to take them to a lab for scanning. There are places that specialize in this and to me it's worth it to have someone else do it. If your lucky you can find someone local.

EDIT: Nikon still makes the cool scan, but dang nearly 2k.

 

[cwsqbm]

Anymore I generally tell people that their best bet for the money is to take them to a lab for scanning.

+1 I took all my parents' slides (pretty much all photos in our house before 1975) and had them scanned and printed. Between the cost of the scanner and my time, it was cheaper and much simpler to have it done for me. The box of photos also made a nice present for my mom, as the projector hadn't been used in years.

 

[DesertBoater]

There are quite a number of scanners out there that will scan film with pretty decent results. I've been playing with scanning some of my 120 negs and then printing, and have been able to blow them up to 13x19 without any trouble at all. The scanner that I've been using is from Epson, and I believe so long as it's a "photo scanner" it should come with a bunch of negative/slide holders that film fits into and is held relatively flat. If you're looking to just save a bunch of your old family photos and whatnot, that will work just fine. If you're looking to print really really high quality photos from negatives, you could look into having a photo print shop scan the negatives on a drum scanner...but it's really not necessary unless you're planning on printing huge and want absolutely no loss in quality. Does that help?

Cheers,
West

 

[rusty_tlc]

We found a 3 in 1 scanner on clearance for $9.99, normally $99.99:Wow1:
It's a no-name china import but at that price it will get us started.
It's a 5M unit with a max of 3200dpi resolution.

Our plan is to use it to sort through stuff, when we find something we want a print of we will send the original to the lab for high res scanning.