I think I asked about this on the old site but cant find any reference.
I have a need for a scanner for general documents but I also need to scan some slides and negs.
The slides negs will be a one off job which encourages the idea of a multi purpose scanner that I can use on an ongoing basis for documents. But I don’t want crap quality or having to dick around endlessly while doing the slides and negs because the scanner is really a doc scanner with an adaptor.
So my questions: are there any photo /doc scanners that also do negs and slides well and efficiently?
If the better option is a dedicated slide neg scanner what should I look at? Kaiser Baas have inexpensive models but I have read bad reports and they save to an SD card whereas I’d prefer to load straight onto my Mac.
Muchos gracias.
don’t worry about this -bought one
No. Bring on the advice! I think I was the one who asked last time round and that blog version disappeared before I could get round to purchase. I am all ears (eyes).
A few thoughts.
If you’ve only got one or two slides, negs or prints to scan, I’ve got a Nikon Coolscan and an Epson A4 flatbed scanner, and could scan them for you.
If you’ve got tens of scans, its worth seeing how much your local camera shop would charge to get them scanned them for you. They usually send them away, and you get a disk back with the scans as high res images.
If you’ve got hundreds of scans to do, it might be worth buying a scanner of some sort to digitise them. If they are exclusively slides and negatives, you can buy very reasonably priced standalone scanners . They scan to an SD card on the device, so you don’t need a driver on your computer; just put the card in a card reader, and plug it into your computer. All you need to do is press the button every few seconds to do a new scan, and feed the next image in. A high-end Nikon or Minolta slide scanner is several hundred pounds
If you’ve got a mixture of negatives, slides and prints to scan, then you might be better off buying an A4 flatbed scanner which also has the facility to scan negs and slides, too. Some just scan the film when you place it on the scanner bed, some have an adaptor. You can pay quite a lot for a flatbed scanner that scans both film and hard copy well. Alternatively, buy one of the standalone neg/slide scanners plus an A4 Epson or Canon scanner – you’d possibly get both for under £200.
This is the sort of stand alone neg/slide scanner I was referring to;
http://essentials.guardianoffers.co.uk/buy.cfm/hobby/zennox-film-and-negative-scanner/41/yes/84288
Similar devices are widely available elsewhere.
Ive ordered an Epson Perfection V370 Film and Print Scanner.
Reviews were overwhelmingly positive on the sites I looked at, plus I need a proper scanner instead of using the mickey mouse scanner on the errr Epson printer.
Costing me A$200 Aussie.
I think I replied on the old site to this. I still shoot film, both medium format and 35mm. I use an Epson V500 flatbed scanner for medium format transparencies, and it does a pretty good job. It’s not so good for 35mm slides and rolls of film because the light source and resolution just aren’t high enough. I bought a PlusTek Opticfilm 7400 slide scanner for about $150 off Gumtree and it gives good results using Vuescan software (the supplied Silverfast software just won’t work with my Mac). It can scan six slides/transparencies on one rack and is pretty slow going, but I think it’s worth it. You could spend ten times as much money on a Nikon Coolscan and get fantastic results, but the PLusTek wors for my archiving purposes.
Hmmm if the V500 hasn’t got enough grunt that gives me pause re the V370 I have just ordered 🙁
It’s probably OK for producing image sizes that you share online, especially if it’s just a one-off job. I wanted something that could do higher res scans when I was ploughing through one roll of 35mm film a week. There are quite a few tweeks and tips that you can use with a flatbed scanner to get the best results from 35mm film: http://photo.net/medium-format-photography-forum/00cOuz
It’s probably OK for producing image sizes that you share online, especially if it’s just a one-off job. I wanted something that could do higher res scans when I was ploughing through one roll of 35mm film a week. There are quite a few tweaks and tips that you can use with a flatbed scanner to get the best results from 35mm film: https://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=140292
I had an Epson Flatbed scanner with a film adaptor (actually it’s still in the loft under “S”) and it was awful to use. It just took sooooo long to do any sort of half decent slide of negative scan that I started to get picky about which ones I did and if I then realised there was dust on the slide, I thought long and hard about redoing it.
At the end of last year I bought a (relatively) cheap and cheerful slide and neg ‘scanner’* which gives better results than the flatbed in a tiny fraction of the time.
It’s by no means perfect and won’t compete with boxes that cost hundreds of pounds but all I really want is a way to have easy access to all my old negatives whenever I want and wherever I am. I didn’t want that to take me most of the rest of my life to achieve!
I got one of these:
https://www.7dayshop.com/products/7dayshop-high-resolution-22mp-35mm-slide-negative-film-scanner-with-16gb-sd-card-DS-123
but they don’t seem to be available at the moment. I read review after review of scanners and there was always someone saying that you can get better ones but this one seemed to be a good compromise in the value for money stakes.
An option I did consider was to buy a posh one, get all the stuff scanned in double quick and sell it on ebay when I was done and before it was superseded but that wasn’t going to happen because even when scanning is quick, it’s still a long process.
*It actually takes photographs of the slide
When I posted the product I had ordered I knew I would elicit a horror story. How is that the same product get such wildly different reviews -not just in this case , pretty much everything.
If this ends in tears I will sort the slides and send the negs of to someone else to do.
Well @johnw yes, it is slow as a wet week in assessing and scanning each slide. At this rate I will be sending them off. But have I misunderstood? I assumed a film negative would be saved as a positive so why are my negs coming out like this …..yes it is a crap photo but it is for illustrative purposes.
Well it’s a software thing. When I used my old Epson Scanner I used the software that came with it to do it on the fly. With my new slide scanner I just tell it that I’m scanning a negative as opposed to a slide and it also does it on the fly. Bear in mind that the scanner can’t know if the 35mm frame you put in front of it is a positive or a negative – so far most of my scans on my slide scanner have actually been of slides as it was my dad’s preferred medium back in the 60’s.
If you’ve already got a stack of scans you want to change then the old faithful IrfanView is probably the easiest option as it has a batch convert capability. If you’ve got a Windows PC and you haven’t already installed IrfanView you should be asking yourself “why not?”.
thanks John.
The scanner does seem to be able to identify that it is colour negative film. I set to colour restore and seems to be working fine albeit painstakingly slow.