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DPChallenge Forums >> Tips, Tricks, and Q&A >> Best way to digitize film?
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06/18/2006 10:02:43 PM · #1
I bought a couple waterproof disposable cameras for a cruise to the Carribean on the brand new Freedom of the Seas, and now I want the film from those cameras digitized. I really only shoot digital, so I don't have a film scanner. I do have a somewhat decent flatbed scanner. I want to know what the best way for me to get these photos digitized is. Should I take the film to a processor and have the photos put on a CD (how good is the quality) or would it be worth it to find someone with a film scanner?
06/18/2006 10:11:22 PM · #2
Large size scanning can get really expensive and I wouldn't think the disposable's capabilities able to justify that cost. I'd go for the CD from the developer and interpolate to upsize if necessary.

Edit to mention - all modern film developing machinery DOES digitize your film first... buy their CD and save having it digitized again.

Message edited by author 2006-06-18 22:12:41.
06/18/2006 10:15:24 PM · #3
The photo CD I got from the waterproof camera I took to the Virgin Islands last year was decent. I took the camera to a place where you get either free doubles or a free CD, and obviously chose the CD. The quality of the digital versions seemed perfectly comparable to the prints, which admittedly weren't amazing, but that was all the cheapness of the camera and nothing to do with the developing. I figure any worthwhile developer is using a decent film scanner to make those CDs.
06/18/2006 10:25:36 PM · #4
Flatbed scanners vary widely in their ability to scan film transparencies. Used to be, they were uniformly awful, but today, many do a respectable job. The ones that do best have dedicated adapters that allow proper lighting. You'd have to figure out whether yours will work for this.
The Photo CD probably will provide OK quality, but the film probably will have more detail available that the pix on CD don't capture, even from a cheapie camera.
Good film scans are pretty expensive, $1 per image and up.
But you have one more option. You can backlight them and photograph them with a DSLR, and this works amazingly well as long as the transparency is held parallel to the camera, and extraneous light is eliminated. I actually made (well, modified) an adapter to do just this, and coupled to a Canon 10D it gives better results than a Nikon LS-30 film scanner!
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