Need a good photo scanner

Gingernutty

I have volunteered to digitise the old family photos. There are hundreds of glossy photos, in a variety of sizes, in both black and white and colour.

I've heard good things about scanners like this, but other reviews say the downside is the macro camera lens is reflected in glossy photos.

There are good reviews for the Epson Perfection range, but they're big flatbed scanners and pricey with it.

And then there's Kodak which seem geared towards business users but have rave reviews. And they're extremely expensive. _pale_

And what's the best way of saving the photos?

Can any of these units scan straight to a hard drive? Dropbox? Photobucket?

Has anyone done anything like this? What are the pitfalls?

Oblivion

I use an earlier version of this Epson flatbed scanner and have found it excellent for photos. It takes up to A4 size. The control software that came with it was easy to use too. I see this version actually has an attachment to take slides and negatives.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B009EOPQD4/ref=psdc_430585031_t1_B00ECBRW5E

My workflow is to scan into an old version of Paintshop Pro where I can resize, sharpen, adjust colour balance before saving as a .jpg to disc.

buglawton

You could try a phone camera and app like scanner pro, that corrects the aspect ratio if you take an image from anywhere other than perfectly overhead. It's very much faster than a flatbed!

Chrishazle

My Epson WF3520 all in one printer scans up to A4 size and up to 2400dpi resolution, plenty enough for scanning photos - plus scans documents from the sheet feeder if you want to scan old bank statements, credit card bills etc. Software is easy to use, scans direct to your chosen folder/HDD I also have an Epson Perfection 4490 Photo flat bed scanner, on which I can scan slides (not easily though!), but have not bothered with it since I got the AI1 printer.

EssexExile

My ordinary HP all in one scans photos fine.

mac.d

I've got an old and pretty basic Canon CanoScan LiDE 25 Scanner (today's equivalent is probably the CanoScan Lide 120). I bought it years ago and I'm still using it to scan photos nowadays without any problems. Don't think you need anything fancy to scan photos.

forgotmyname

Epson RX620. very good scanner and comes with a built in 35mm negative scanner.

I needed to scan other formats though and bought a dedicated negative scanner that will take anything 35mm,110 and older formats.

funguy

Are there any scanners that have a feed tray for loading up 20 or 30 4x6 photos at a time and scan one after the other as separate files? thanks

victor2

Gingernutty wrote: »

I have volunteered to digitise the old family photos. There are hundreds of glossy photos, in a variety of sizes, in both black and white and colour.

I've heard good things about scanners like this, but other reviews say the downside is the macro camera lens is reflected in glossy photos.

There are good reviews for the Epson Perfection range, but they're big flatbed scanners and pricey with it.

And then there's Kodak which seem geared towards business users but have rave reviews. And they're extremely expensive. _pale_

And what's the best way of saving the photos?

Can any of these units scan straight to a hard drive? Dropbox? Photobucket?

Has anyone done anything like this? What are the pitfalls?

I started to do the same thing with my old photo albums. Been doing it on and off for a few years now, with over 2,000 photos done and quite a few albums to do yet.
I have an Epson Perfection V300 Photo scanner for the job, which will also scan negatives, where I still have them. Prints from the 1970's have already faded or lost much colour definition, probably due to using the cheapest film processing labs at the time. Where I still have the negatives for those, I get a much better scan from that.
It takes time, opening up the albums and removing the prints from the adhesive backed pages without damaging them, then putting them back. I did try photographing the albums using a tripod like this:

Wasn't very successful, difficult to deal with refelected light. Illustrates how some of the colours have faded too!
With a flatbed scanner you can remove the cover from the pages then lay the pages flat on the scanner to save trying to remove the photos themselves. You do tend to get the adhesive on the scanner though, so removing each photo gets the best result. I figure the albums will end up in the loft once scanned anyway, and may never see the light of day again.

Images are scanned straight into jpg files and stored as such. There was extra work required with cropping them if they were photographed as above, As for storing the images, they are on my hard dive, a backup drive and stored on the web through one of the free services - MEGA, because they gave enough space when I setup the account.

ChiefGrasscutter

MEGA - that is real funny
You know who set up MEGA
Yes - an individual who goes by the "name" of Kim Dotcom
And remember his last venture: that was called "Megaupload"
And do you remember what happened to that?

Well it was closed down by the USA FBA/NSI due to the illegal material that was stored on it and they confiscated all the servers and have never returned them. So all those who had perfectly legal stuff sitting quite innocently on it lost it forever.
As to Kim himself - still awaiting extradition to the USA from Oz last I heard.

Anyway - back on topic
Any flat bed scanner will scan prints perfectly well
If you want to scan slides and negatives you are in a whole different ball game due to both their small size and the varying emulsions used by the film makers such a Kodachrome etc. For a dedicated archive quality 35mm slide scanner expect to pay £500+ and for medium format more like £1000+
This is the point where doing your own research and carefully looking into exactly what each model does and does not becomes essential. Then there is the realm of the software packages used with the scanner such a Vuescan and Silverfast..........

If you store scans as jpg's then you run into problem of the lossy compression algorithms of the format, so detail which is in the scan is lost as soon as it is save to disc in the format. Better to store as TIFFs which does not involve any loss of detail - though of course the file sizes are correspondingly bigger as a result.

Mr_Toad

victor2 wrote: »

I started to do the same thing with my old photo albums. Been doing it on and off for a few years now, with over 2,000 photos done and quite a few albums to do yet.
I have an Epson Perfection V300 Photo scanner for the job, which will also scan negatives, where I still have them. Prints from the 1970's have already faded or lost much colour definition, probably due to using the cheapest film processing labs at the time. Where I still have the negatives for those, I get a much better scan from that.
It takes time, opening up the albums and removing the prints from the adhesive backed pages without damaging them, then putting them back. I did try photographing the albums using a tripod like this:

Wasn't very successful, difficult to deal with refelected light. Illustrates how some of the colours have faded too!
With a flatbed scanner you can remove the cover from the pages then lay the pages flat on the scanner to save trying to remove the photos themselves. You do tend to get the adhesive on the scanner though, so removing each photo gets the best result. I figure the albums will end up in the loft once scanned anyway, and may never see the light of day again.

Images are scanned straight into jpg files and stored as such. There was extra work required with cropping them if they were photographed as above, As for storing the images, they are on my hard dive, a backup drive and stored on the web through one of the free services - MEGA, because they gave enough space when I setup the account.

Forget all that, tell us about the bikes.