Slide to Pc/Digital

Antigone05

Just got a few boxes of slides from my folks abroad and im looking to digitalise them.

Any recommendations?

im looking for a cheap one, Windows 7 64bit compatible.

davmigil

Macro lens and a light box if you have them already

Antigone05

no dont have any gear unfortunately (i wish)

Heebie

A scanner will give you a better result than a macro lens.
Most good scanners have transparency adapters. If you have formats larger than 35mm, you could get one than handles 120.
Most photolabs with Fuji Frontier equipment should be able to scan your slides & put them on CD for you if you don't want to spend hours & hours & hours working on it.

There are specialty film scanners.. good ones cost a lot.. cheap ones tend to do a mediocre (or downright crappy) job.

A macro lens with a light box will certainly work.. but you'll get some distortion. (it won't be perfectly shaped due to lenses not being flat.) If you've got a light box, a digital camera, and a macro lens, this can be nice cheap option. Buying a light box and a macro lens will cost more than buying a decent scanner. Canon and Epson both have scanners that will do the job for €200 or less.

HiKite

Hi there, I'm trying to come to a decision between these two:

CanoScan LiDE 700F (nice and cheap)
CanoScan 9000F (as dear as i can go)

Anyone use these ones for scanning 35mm? I'm hoping to do a few A1 size prints from the scans, so I'm hoping these will be good enough!

Cheers, e.

Heebie

If you're serious about photography.. or want to get a lot of film scanned faster.. go for the more expensive one. It can do up to 12-frames of film in a single batch.. whereas the cheaper one can do one frame of film before you have to do another setup.

The more expensive one will also do medium-format films.

Either one is 9600dpi optical in 48-bit color, so the sensor system is probably the same. The backlight used to do the scanning may not be.. so I'd read reviews if you're looking at the cheaper.

Chances are good either one will do a good job if you're looking to get your family snapshots into the digital realm for viewing.

I like my Epson Perfection V500 Photo.. it'll do batches etc... and it was about €200-250 if I recall correctly. (It was a year or two ago now that I bought it.)

Futuresounds wrote: »

Hi there, I'm trying to come to a decision between these two:

CanoScan LiDE 700F (nice and cheap)
CanoScan 9000F (as dear as i can go)

Anyone use these ones for scanning 35mm? I'm hoping to do a few A1 size prints from the scans, so I'm hoping these will be good enough!

Cheers, e.

magicbastarder

Heebie wrote: »

Either one is 9600dpi optical in 48-bit color

it's worth pointing out that a 9600dpi scan would result in a close to 150 megapixel scan from a 35mm frame, which is way beyond what the optics are actually capable of dealing with, and way more information than actually contained in the film - so don't worry too much about picking based on this criterion.

case in point - nikon's dedicated film scanner, the coolscan 9000, maxes out at 4000dpi, and that's about three or four grand.

HiKite

Great info, cheers folks.

I've decided to up the budget and go for the Epson V700, after talking to a few people about the various Canon options; funny that medium format was mentioned, I've just come back from a few evenings online looking at the serious deals you can get on these cameras at the moment; but I'll wait until I get the scanner first to see if I'm happy with the upscaled versions of the 35mm scans.

Heebie, what size do you reckon you could blow up your 35mm scans before they'd start to noticeably pixelate (from about 3-4 feet)?

Thanks again, Enda.

Heebie

As someone else pointed out.. a 9600x9600dpi scan of a 35mm film is an enormous amount of data.. how "pixelated" it will appear will actually depend on the grain of the film.

The faster & finer-grained the film, the higher resolution you can scan at before the film becomes the limitation... but for making big prints.. it will be the film.

Something like Fuji Velvia 50 slide film, or Ilford Pan-F 50, Kodak Tri-X, Portra etc.. are going to give you ludicrous resoulutions if they're shot well.. enough to make wall-sized posters no problem.
Crap film (say.. Kodak Disc Camera, or something along those lines) might make a wallet-sized print that looks good.. because there's so little data there.

Most of what you're likely to have is going to be 100-400ISO.. which, if well-shot, should look good well into medium poster sizes (16x20, 18x24 area).. you might find stuff that's really organic might look good even a lot bigger than that. (landscapes, people, but without architecture/ wires in the frame.) Things with sharp horizontal and vertical lines "break down" at lower resolutions. (in quotes because I just couldn't think of a better way to see it.. you'll see jagged edges along straight lines that travel at any angle within the frame much quicker than you'll see problems with more organic shapes like bushes, trees, and faces)

If you're scanning black & white film.. I actually recommend scanning in full color, with any dust-reduction turned off. (it doesn't tend to work with B&W) and then mix-down to black & white within Photoshop etc.... but if you're in a hurry.. you might not want to do all that post processing.

Don't forget that scanning at really high resolution with really deep color takes HUGE amounts of space.. a lot more than camera raw images do. (A good scan for making a poster, saved as a .TIF or .PSD can be hundreds of megs.. camera-raw for something similar probably 10-30 megs somewhere depending on the make & resolution.) You'll burn through hard-drive space really quickly. Lower-resolutions scans are also faster if speed is an issue.

I'd recommend a target size of something like 8x12 or 10x15 at 303dpi (upsampling from there tends to work well up to like 20x30.) If you have drive space & time to burn.. choose a maximum print size you want to be able to make.. and scan to a target of that.

You should probably pick 10-12 of your "favorite" images.. and then a few that are pretty crap exposure-wise.. and practice.. figure out what works for different situations with the scanner you get.

and.. it should be a fun exercise.. so have fun.

Futuresounds wrote: »

Great info, cheers folks.

Heebie, what size do you reckon you could blow up your 35mm scans before they'd start to noticeably pixelate (from about 3-4 feet)?

Thanks again, Enda.

HiKite

Hi again,

just to let ye know that I got the Epson V700 and it's pretty savage, at the moment I'm scanning some B&W negs and have the output settings set to 95cm by 63cm, 300DPI (I wasn't sure about the DPI settings, I can set them higher, but do print shops actually print higher resolution than 300DPI?). I turned the Digital ICE off but turned on the multi-scan, it's scanning each neg 16 times, this is a really handy way to remove dust and film grain. File sizes are about 240mb.

I scanned some negs for web-use also, and set the output to about 25cm x 40cm, 72DPI, at these settings they scan really quickly, but they still look great on screen. File size is about 2.5mb.

I've lots more film to experiment with, it is amazing to see the details come to life on screen; when I have the scans organised, I'll post a link to them.

Cheers, Enda.