35mm/negative scanner

Skint_Catt

Hi all, me again!

I need to get some old slides & negatives onto digital please - could anyone recommend a scanner please? Max budget is £100 but I can't find a single one with decent reviews. I have my parents wedding 'photo's' that were never printed & want to do it for their 40th anniversary this year and on hearing this my FIL has given me a couple of thousand slides to put onto DVD's for him!

Please help!

totalsolutions

You are going to be busy.... 1000 at 1 per min is 16hrs scan time. But scan's take a good 3-4 mins each. How much help can you afford? A scanner is going to be £600 and up.

How do you want me to help?

isofa

Some of the flatbed Canon and Epsons are ok, they have adapters to scan negs and pos. But they are nothing like the quality of a dedicated slide scanner.

Have a look at the reviews on www.pcpro.co.uk

Also search the forum, as I reply to posts on this nearly every week...

However as for scanning a couple of thousand, I'd forget that straight away, it'd take years! Several minutes a scan, then adjust the colour and save, another couple of minutes, you could probably do 12 to 15 in an hour!

Take them to a pre-press bureau and pay to have them scanned, but it'll cost quite a bit for that sort of quantity.

Skint_Catt

I'm redundant so I have as much time as it takes! £600 isn't a good recomendation but thanks anyway.

Thanks isofa - will have a look on pcpro. I'm not prepared to pay anyone anything I can do myself, but thanks. We've lost £20k income between me and my partners paycut, so the slide scanner was to be an Xmas present in trade for my time to do this for my FIL.

ukcarper

I've got a canon flatbed that scans negs quality not to bad although negs need to be clean and free from scratches. My scanner is 3 or 4 years old and take a lot longer than a minute to scan I don’t know if the newer ones are any quicker.

Nilrem

I've got a Canon 8800f that cost about £130 last year, which deals with negatives pretty well.
However at high resolution you're looking at about 4-5 minutes for it to scan 4 slides (or a strip of negatives), and then a fairly fast PC to do any work with them (I ended up with slides in the 4-6k pixels per side range at the highest res).

The plus side of them being relatively slow, is that whilst they are scanning in, you can get on with preparing the next batch to go in...
It nearly killed me doing around 250...

Freebyman

I have a Canoscan 3200F which I have used to scan negatives successfully in the past. Its a few years old now, but it only cost me £40 new so I am assuming there will be a few out there secondhand?

isofa

Skint_Catt wrote: »

Thanks isofa - will have a look on pcpro. I'm not prepared to pay anyone anything I can do myself, but thanks. We've lost £20k income between me and my partners paycut, so the slide scanner was to be an Xmas present in trade for my time to do this for my FIL.

Image scanning to a high quality is a specialist job, which is why a bureau charges for an operator.

Anyone can throw something onto a flatbed and click scan, but the result will be mediocre. To set up the colours correctly, hopefully scan in LAB not ropey old RGB and balance it properly requires skill and a keen eye, let alone any retouching in Photoshop. I know I spent years doing a huge set for a client, with professional gear. Imaging is a key part of my job.

If however you are just looking for a quick and dirty way to get the slides onto screen, I'd probably go for the Canon Canoscan 8800F, it's around £150 new (here from Amazon), but you should be able to find bargains if you hunt around. Both links have good reviews.

Robin_T_Cox

I use a Veho scanner for this job, like the one shown here:
http://www.technologyinthehome.com/Shop/Technology-AND-Gadgets/210-Veho-USB-Film-AND-Slide-Scanner.html?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=Product%2BSearch&utm_campaign=210
It's easy to use, and you only need to connect it to your PC (via USB) after you have scanned your slides/negs to a SD card in the scanner, so it's very portable.

An excellent buy (here at £69.95),

vaio

We are going through similar at the moment although only have about 1k to do.

We looked at scanners, cheap ones are slow and low quality, fast/high quality ones are expensive and in both cases you have to do the post scan tidying yourself.

We found a place in Swindon that will scan then on a professional scanner for 15p a slide so that’s where ours are going in the new year.

Skint_Catt

Robin_T_Cox wrote: »

I use a Veho scanner for this job, like the one shown here:
http://www.technologyinthehome.com/Shop/Technology-AND-Gadgets/210-Veho-USB-Film-AND-Slide-Scanner.html?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=Product%2BSearch&utm_campaign=210
It's easy to use, and you only need to connect it to your PC (via USB) after you have scanned your slides/negs to a SD card in the scanner, so it's very portable.

An excellent buy (here at £69.95),

These were the ones (plus the ION?) that I was looking at initially - but I can't find any good reviews - they all get 1 stars out of 5.