Advice on negative scanners

lonestarfan

I have heard of a negative scanner recently and was thinking of buying one. Has anyone got experience of them and what would be a good make and what you need to consider? TIA.

bcl999

There have been a few threads about this in the past as I remember reading them when I bought one.

I started off with one of the small ones that tkae a strip at a time which you push/pull through but sent it back as it was dreadful to use. I ended up buying a CAnon 8800F, a flatbed scanner which scans everything. It wil do 2 strips of 35mm negatives at a time. It can also do mutliple photos at one time and split them into different files. The ordinary scanner function for docs etc is much faster and much beter quality than my old one. I bought mine used off eBay - I think the later model was the 9000F but could be wrong.

I'm very happy with it, although if you want to get the very best quality of scan, you will need to do post-processing and I still find that a bit complicated.

Dave_C_2

See my comments on the cheap as chips Aldi scanner

Dave

lonestarfan

Dave_C wrote: »

See my comments on the cheap as chips Aldi scanner

Dave

The plustech or reflecta do seem a bit pricy. Would u say now you've had a cheap Aldi one that you would buy plustech or reflecta if you had your time again? Have they improved in the last year so that now there is a mid range that would be an acceptable standard. Perhaps the up to date canon as mentioned above might be better. I want to scan negatives in and make one of those photo books ive seen on line for a 21st birthday gift. The last 10 yrs are on a digital camera but the first 11 years are negatives. Thnx.

Ben84

There are commercial services at some shops who develop photos for doing this, so I would consider using their equipment instead of buying a machine yourself. Their machine should be much higher quality than anything you're likely to buy for home use and if there's no ongoing need to scan negatives, investing in a machine to perform a set number of negatives can be compared directly to the cost of having them scanned for you. It may work out cheaper and you'd have better quality images as well.

zee_2

I bougt aldi scanner months ago think it was £28 , does the job ,lets me copy to picture then I load them to my picasa site where I can adjust them as reqr. easy to use and for normal photo negs. ok for price , also my children use it to load old family negs to their own l/tops.

Dave_C_2

lonestarfan wrote: »

The plustech or reflecta do seem a bit pricy. Would u say now you've had a cheap Aldi one that you would buy plustech or reflecta if you had your time again? Have they improved in the last year so that now there is a mid range that would be an acceptable standard. Perhaps the up to date canon as mentioned above might be better. I want to scan negatives in and make one of those photo books ive seen on line for a 21st birthday gift. The last 10 yrs are on a digital camera but the first 11 years are negatives. Thnx.

Haven't got a clue about Plutrech or Reflecta. I bought the Aldi scanner to do a job and just made the best of it. In retrospect you get what you pay for!

If I had to do it again I would go for something like this

Dave

cottager

bcl999 wrote: »

I ended up buying a CAnon 8800F, a flatbed scanner which scans everything. It wil do 2 strips of 35mm negatives at a time. It can also do mutliple photos at one time and split them into different files. The ordinary scanner function for docs etc is much faster and much beter quality than my old one. I bought mine used off eBay - I think the later model was the 9000F but could be wrong.

I'm very happy with it, although if you want to get the very best quality of scan, you will need to do post-processing and I still find that a bit complicated.

I have the Canon Canoscan 8800F too, bought a couple of years ago though I didn't begin using it in earnest till last year. Haven't got around to scanning my old negatives yet, as I'm still wading through a huge collection of 35mm slides, but if it copes with them anything like the slides it won't miss a beat. I've been seriously impressed with it, and it's certainly robust (scanned about 13,000 slides so far). I've scanned some photos, and they've been fine too.

Later my brother also bought a Canoscan, secondhand and not quite the same model as mine but similar: he's in the middle of a slide-scanning exercise too, but I know he's also done some negatives and been very pleased.

Had to become accustomed to the software, which was quite different from my old HP flatbed, but it was fine once I got into the swing of it. It's multi-functional, doing copies, scans to PDF, emailing etc, but this is just what I wanted and I've used all these functions.

Being a flatbed, I've found while scanning slides (and I imagine it would be the same with negatives) that I do have to be very careful about dust. You can imagine that when creating a large image from something so small as a 35mm slide or negative, tiny specks you barely see can end up quite prominent. Sometimes it doesn't matter as they're lost in a dark area, but often they'll be visible (and personally I prefer to rescan without them, rather than edit them out later). So I'm dusting off the glass with a very soft photographic brush very frequently, and also (though not quite so often) removing finger smudges too, being careful not to scratch the glass. It doesn't seem to matter how careful I am! -- the simple action of lifting the lid and changing the slides in the adaptor for the next batch just seems to create/attract dust and tiny bits of fibre.

Not the cheapest, costing (new) £179 from Amazon in 2010, but it's been worth every penny to me for the hammering it's getting, plus the other useful functions. For instance, I didn't have any PDF facility before, though I'd been thinking about some software for years. With this I plan at some point to PDF some old paperwork, the sort of "possibly important" stuff you're not quite confident you should get rid of completely, but don't really want occupying all those folders and ring-binders any more. I regularly need to 'photocopy' documents too, so for me the copying's also useful (I don't have a multi-functional printer which does it).

You should be able to pick up a secondhand one (or a similar model) much more reasonably. It depends really whether you'd have a use for the other stuff it does -- you may not, and maybe a dedicated film scanner would be better for you.

Haven't checked, but think bcl999's right that the equivalent to the 8800F now could be the 9000F. I also agree that for the best results you'll probably need to do some post-scan editing.

Ben84's recommendation to investigate commercial services is a good one: it may seem more costly, but if your 21st project will be something of a one-off and you don't really envisage doing anything similar again, it could be the best solution.

mr_fishbulb

Is a negative scanner one that says things like:

"I don't think that photo will scan very well"

"What's the point, you're never going to look at them"

"The 70s called about this photo; they want their clothes back"

?

gavpowell

No, that's Trinny and Suscanner.