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02/27/2006 01:21:49 PM · #1 |
I am in need of a negative scanner that is able to handle all sorts of negative sizes. So, I was wondering if I need to look for something in particular.
Thanks for any suggestions. |
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02/27/2006 01:24:49 PM · #2 |
| I love the Nikon film scanners but the one that handles different formats is not cheap (I think it's the coolscan 9000). I have the coolscan 5000 and it's great but only 35mm (or whatever you can fit into a 35mm slide holder). |
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02/27/2006 01:33:43 PM · #3 |
Yeah, I am going to need something that I can scan all sorts of negative sizes with.
My grandfather has decided that it is time to start going through each and every photo and negative he has and start noting who's in the images and give them out to family members. He's been bugging all of the "PhotoLab" people at places like Walgreens with his negatives, some of which are nearing 50 years of age.
So... I figure a negative scanner is in my future... |
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02/27/2006 02:07:10 PM · #4 |
I started out planning to scan my 35mm negs/slides and kinda got sucked into the family slide collection (thankfully, almost all 35mm slides). Knowing that would likely happen, I stretched and paid more for the faster scanner and don't regret that for 1 second now!
It's very time consuming and you might want to get some spare hard drives before you start :-) but in the end; I am happy to see how my parents started commenting and talking about the images. A lot of them I have never seen but a reasonable number I remember from slide nights growing up.
What is interesting to me is that the stuff we discuss here about an image nobody really seems to care about in these particular images - me included. Obviously, it's the memories in the images not the technique e.t.c. |
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02/27/2006 02:19:34 PM · #5 |
I just started using my new Nikon Coolscan V ED today. The quality of the scans are amazing. It only does 35mm negative scans though. I think it was a smart purchase for me. I shoot a lot of film as well as digital.
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02/27/2006 03:10:49 PM · #6 |
I just finished (yesterday!) a three-year odyssey of "scanning" a half-century worth of 35mm slides that my Dad took of our family. Some date to the late 1940s. There were in excess of 3500 of them. Most were done with a Nikon film scanner. The last 750 or so were done with the Canon 10D, however. I found this to be a superior method overall. Much faster acquisition, easier to deal with high-density negatives, and the resolution of the "scan" exceeded the quality of pretty much all of the slides, though a close call on some. The Nikon scanner was the LS-30, so it was not one of the newer high-end scanners. The newer scanners would have been faster and better able to deal with higher density slides, but at quite a high cost. As already posted, a scanner capable of dealing with medium format originals is VERY expeensive.
For larger positives or negatives, there is obviously a trade-off between quality and the scanning device used. If highest quality is an absolute requirement for you, then a dedicated film scanner is the way to go. Having them professionally scanned is very expensive, and if you have a significant number of larger positives or negatives, it's really an ineconomical option. My project would have easily cost $4000, probably more, and I still would have been faced with a mountain of post-processing, since no color correction or color restoration is included in basic scan prices.
What I did with the 10D is to re-purpose an old slide duplicator. I removed the crappy single-element lens from the duplicator (with a hammer, LOL) and made a mount to attach the duplicator to the front of my 100/2.8 Macro lens. I set the distance so that I could adjust the crop slightly by telescoping the adapter (it included such an adjustment) and then focused the macro lens on the slide, being careful to include a little space at the edges. I backlit the adapter with a compact fluorescent bulb, and did a custom WB with no slide in place. I then shot each slide with the appropriate exposure (at f/8 and ISO 100) and post-processed in Photoshop. I shot all in RAW so that I could compensate for color casts in the original and pull out as much dynamic range as possible.
I found I could shoot up to about 100 slides per hour, including a quick de-dusting prior to shooting and occasional re-shoots for missed exposure. Post-processing, including RAW conversion, typically took about 2 minutes or less per photo, including correcting rotation and cropping, correcting color, cloning out a few remaining dust particles, sharpening, and saving in a target directory.
For formats other than 35mm, this technique is still usable, but a light table, mask and registration tool could be used in place of the slide duplicator. Exposure times would be longer, but still far, far faster than a scan. A higher end DSLR, like a 5D, would produce very high quality reproductions of even medium format originals, with the caveat that some resolution would be lost or some cropping would be required due to aspect ratio differences.
Flatbed scanners are better than they used to be with transparencies, but I do believe that the quality will be inferior to either a dedicated film scanner or the DSLR duplication method.
Whatever your choose, the time required is a huge factor that should not be ignored. Your time is not really free.
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02/27/2006 06:18:19 PM · #7 |
Originally posted by BADDBOYY21:
I just started using my new Nikon Coolscan V ED today. The quality of the scans are amazing. It only does 35mm negative scans though. I think it was a smart purchase for me. I shoot a lot of film as well as digital. |
We bought this same scanner last week and are pleased with it. Much better than the Minolta Dual Scan II we had before, though, to be fair, a few years newer!
BTW, it's known as both the Coolscan LS 50 ED and the Coolscan LS V ED, for some reason.
Scans need PS work to boost saturation and adjust colour balance and I prefer removing just a touch of the noise myself rather than using the digital ICE, GEM, ROC etc offered by the scanner.
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02/28/2006 09:56:09 AM · #8 |
| Canon has some scanners that do slides, negatives, and MF. the 8400 is the least expensive. |
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