Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2008/12/22
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]On Dec 22, 2008, at 12:39 AM, Robert wrote: >> I'm interesting in purchasing a film scanner. I've looked at the >> Nikons and they get good reviews but my knowledge of film scanners >> is limited. I'm interested in a good one to begin digitizing my over >> 20 years of negatives and slides. While the Coolscan 5000 is not out >> of my price range, I'm wondering about other scanners that LUGGERS >> have used and are still using. I feel your pain. I've almost finished scanning over 20,000 slides taken over the last 50 years. I've made most of the mistakes already. A bits of advice before starting:: 1. Don't scan everything. Sort your slides first and cull out the bad ones. I found that only one in four slides are worth keeping. Fewer if you are more critical. Each slide takes about 6 to 7 minutes to scan if you are using a high resolution and ICE. The bad ones take as long as the good ones. If you have a couple of thousand slides you can plan on spending many hours sitting before the scanner. Don't believe the scanner ads that say that you can scan at high resolution in 90 seconds. It ain't so. 2. Scan at the lowest resolution acceptable for your purpose. Not everything needs to be scanned at 5400 lpi. Posting on the web, even the LUG, only requires data files in the 1 MB region. Keep the good slides carefully indexed so that you can recover the original if National Geographic wants to put one on its cover. 3. Most decent slide scanners will produce acceptable work up to 2400 lpi. If that is OK, get the scanner that is mechanically the most reliable. My Konica-Minolta Dimage 5400 produced superb results at 5400 lpi but had to be repaired several times and finally gave up the ghost. Konica-Minolta is now out of the scanner business and third party repair agencies find it impossible to get some parts. I finished the last 1000 slides on a much lower cost Epson Perfection V500 flat bed scanner. I can get reasonable 2400 lpi scans. When the project is finished, I can use the scanner for prints and other stuff. 4. If scanning slides and films is not going to be a regular part of your photographic activities, consider having an outside firm do the work. You may not save any money but you won't have to spend hours sitting in front of the scanner. Buy the best digital camera you can afford and consign film based slides and negatives to history's scrap heap. 5. Get a good image storage and database program for your computer. Now that I've thrown away all those little slide boxes with their careful written notes, I find it difficult to remember what I've scanned. I am using iPhoto on my Mac and stored the images in several iPhoto libraries so that I don't have to deal with huge files. I am sure that there are much better image database programs out there. Then you can transfer your worries to the arcane world of digital data archiving. Larry Z