[Leica] Re: Slide and film scanning

[Frank.Dernie at btinternet.com (Frank Dernie)]

A friend of mine bought an Ohnar slide copier and has been using it to  
copy his slides onto his DSLR. I have not seen comparisons between a  
scan and his files but his results look pretty good.
Frank

On 22 Dec, 2008, at 15:59, Lawrence Zeitlin wrote:

>
> 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
>
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