Really off-topic, anyone scan 35mm negatives to digital?

[jostby]

I have boxes of 35mm negatives dating 30yrs and would like to convert them to digital. Any "economical" suggestions for what type of scanner to get? A quick look on ebay showed them from $9 to $500. I know you generally get what you pay for but I would think there is probably something in the $50 range that would suit my needs. Anybody here use one?

oops, maybe this should be in the "pictures" or "other" sections?? (admins, feel free to move this post)

[gasgasman]

I know Wal Mart does 'em.
Would be expensive for you though, like $0.10 a frame.

[Rick]

I think Costco does that as well. They transfered my 8mm video to DVD.

[GMP]

A guy I work with got one recently, I'll ask. The pics look pretty good from what I saw. I have a lot of old 35mm slides I'd like to do someday.

FWIW, you can do 8mm video (even standard 8 and Hi8 analog video) yourself with a Sony Digital 8 camcorder. The analog video will be digitized and streamed through the Firewire port. These can be found cheap now. I happened to have one, plus a large library of 8mm tapes. Worked very well

[HydroDog]

I bought a SVP ps9700 off of Amazon for around $110 a last summer. It does negitives,slides and photos.
It works pretty good but it is time consuming. The only thing I did not care for and I'm not sure inhearant to only this machine or not, but it kind of washes out the colors a little bit. So then I have to open the photos in a different program to readjust the contrast and brightness before saving them.

[Berkyboy]

Jostby, you're right, like most things, scanners included, you get what you pay for, the key is determining what quality of scan that you actually need.

To be honest I don't think there are many decent scanners for much less than $500 (new $150 -$200 used on ebay). At least if you want to get adequate dynamic range, the ability to show details in the shadows and the highlight areas in your scans. So unless you?re willing to make that kind of investment you might want to have them done by somebody else until you can determine what quality of scan you need.

I literally have 10s of thousands of negatives and transparencies that I'd love to have a digital copies of but the reality of it is only about 10% of them are even worthy of being considered "scan worthy" so I would recommend that you cull out the ones that you don?t need as there not worth the time, or money, to scan.

I?m not sure about the cost of having it done by another party (Walmart, Ritz Camera etc) as I do them myself, I currently have a Epson V750 Pro / $800, but I have found that investing in a small portable light table (mine is about 11?X14? $50) and a good viewing loupe ($20-$50) is the key so you can edit out the bad images, this ultimately saves a lot of time and is especially helpful if you are paying to have them scanned.

If your not used to reading a negative through a loupe it doesn?t take long to figure out what to look for (is it a least in focus) before even considering having it scanned.

Once I?ve picked out the winners I then mount the selected negative into a 35mm slide mount were you have to cut the negative down to the one frame (a box of 100 Pako plastic slide mounts is roughly $7) this helps protect the original negative for long term storage and makes them easier to handle. It also gives you a surface to write information on about the image. If you go this route you need to invest in a pair of cotton gloves ($5) to keep from touching the negative / slide surface with your bare hands.

Before even considering a scanner I would highly recommend that you have a couple hundred of them scanned professionally and see if that meets your needs before making an investment in a good scanner. I used to get this done in 12MB files (more than adequate for making 16X20 prints) for 20 cents. If you do the math, at 20 cents a scan, you could get 2500 images scanned professionally for $500.

The other thing to consider is the amount of time it takes to scan an image on your own, my experience is that you?re lucky to get 15-20 scans done in an hour which obviously is going to get time consuming if you want to do even 1000.

Steve

[jostby]

Thanks Steve. That's pretty much the info I was looking for.

[Berkyboy]

What limits the quality of most flatbed scanners is that the semi transparent film is not intended to be sandwiched directly between glass and the cover, or lid, as the covers's (usually) white surface interfers with what the scanner lens sees.

Film negatives and transperencies are designed to have light shone through them with that image being focused on a surface. High end film scanners use that same principle.

There are some flatbed scanners that are designd specifically for scanning film and with appropriate software they achieve excellent results.