35mm Slide scanner

[1934hotrod]

Greeting looking for information from anyone using a slide scanner. Do not want a stand alone with memory.

Trying to find a quality scanner that will run as a Peripheral.

Any advice is welcome thanks in advance.

 

[acearchie]

I use the Canoscan 8800f.

One important thing to note is that you will probably want to purchase some scanning software as the out of the box software isn’t often that customisable.

The popular options are VueScan and Silverfast. If you play your cards right these sometimes get bundled with the scanner if you buy from the right retailer.

I still shoot film so now pay for my films to be scanned when being developed as I find I have less free time and it’s not hugely costly they also have greater colour accuracy.

If you want to see some of my film scans then:

• Here are a selection of colour 120
• Here are a selection of 35mm Colour
• Here are a selection of B&W 120

B&W is much easier to scan as you don’t have to worry about colour balance and correction.

I have to say that my scanning skills have got a lot better since scanning some of those shots so take them all with a pinch of salt but since no one else has replied I thought I would throw my opinion in!

 

[Neal B]

I have a Plustek 8200 Ai which came with SilverFast 8. The Plustek scanner is a deciated slide/35mm scanner so you can not use it for anything else. The Plustek is probably not as good as the old Nikons, but it is good enough for semi-pros and me. The SilverFast documentation was poor at best. I found a site (lynda.com) which offered online training for SilverFast and general scanning. I was able to master the SilverFast after taking the course. Vuescan is highly rated so it to should be a software option. I have over 10,000 slides a large amount of 35mm film from my father and grand father to scan and restore dating back around 90 years.

 

[1934hotrod]

First thank you both, I will research further the products mentioned. I have a bunch of slides I shot from 65 - 85 i wish to get into iphoto

I use the Canoscan 8800f.

One important thing to note is that you will probably want to purchase some scanning software as the out of the box software isn’t often that customisable.

The popular options are VueScan and Silverfast. If you play your cards right these sometimes get bundled with the scanner if you buy from the right retailer.

I still shoot film so now pay for my films to be scanned when being developed as I find I have less free time and it’s not hugely costly they also have greater colour accuracy. QUOTE]

acearchie,

Where do you find film and how hard is it to get it developed, what's a roll of 36 cost to have developed and scanned, ball park is good.

 

[MacCruiskeen]

Where do you find film and how hard is it to get it developed, what's a roll of 36 cost to have developed and scanned, ball park is good.

Freestyle (freestylephoto.biz) in CA and B&H (bhphotovideo.com) in NY are usually well-stocked with whatever is available, although at this point if you want color slide film that means whatever is available from Fuji, as Kodak has dropped all their e6 products.

There's still a few good labs left that will do roll scans with processing. Dwayne's is relatively inexpensive and reliable--will probably cost $10-$15 per roll. Some of the more pro-oriented labs will offer higher-res scans, but that will of course cost extra. For instance A&I charges twice that but the scans are better.

 

[logista]

What do you expect to do with the digitized slides? Is it only slides, or film, too? These will help you decide.

I had a Nikon Coolscan which was great for slides, but slow and now it's discontinued. The bundled Nikon software never got updated for OS X, but VueScan can still talk to it in Mavericks. It couldn't do anything other than 35mm though. You can still find them used, but they're expensive.

I sold the Coolscan and bought an Epson V600 (flatbed). It has a transparency lid for only part of it, but it's wide enough to do 120 film (the V700 has a full-width transparency lid). For my purposes (reference scans of slides and negatives to go onto DVDs for the family) it works well and relatively quickly. I don't spend a lot of time color correcting and spotting because these are snapshots and won't be printed.

 

[1934hotrod]

My slides are from the war 1966 - 1970 I want to post them on another forum for the solders I served with.

I use a Nikon 3200 today, but have an old Konica with a 1.2 n57mm f 12 lens that I would like to use again, but that will be regular prints, no slides.

 

[Ubele]

A few years ago, I bought a CanoScan 8800F to digitize my 700+ photo collection, and I can wholeheartedly recommend that scanner. I started scanning my negatives, but the process was painfully slow compared to scanning the prints, which was quite fast. Although the negative scans were slightly higher in quality than the print scans, they weren't "enough better" to justify the countless additional hours the negative-scanning process would have taken. I then processed the scans with Adobe Photoshop Elements, optimizing the images and removing dust and other glitches.

So if you want the best quality and don't mind spending the time it takes, scan your negatives. If you have a lot of photos and also have prints, scanning the prints will take much less time, with only a slight loss in sharpness. I recently got OnOne Perfect Photo Suite and found that some of the presets make some of my old scans look sharper but still natural.

Another option is to pay a service scan your photos. I considered doing that. It certainly would have been cheaper than doing it myself, no matter what hourly dollar value I placed on my time, but I wanted control of the process and to make in-the-moment decisions of what to scan and what not to scan. I enjoy those sorts of projects, and, if I had to do it again, I still would have done it myself.

 

[acearchie]

Just to add something that drastically changed my scanning...

Buy a rocket blower. It will literally save you hours getting rid of dust in PS.

A couple of quick puffs on the negs before placing them in and maybe a lucky puff once it’s secure and now I barely get any specks!

 

[glenthompson]

Compare the cost of a scanner and your time vs. using a scanning service like ScanCafe. After culling my images, I didn't have enough to justify a scanner. Much cheaper to send them out.

I had a lot more prints than slides so I scanned the prints with my ScanSnap which did an acceptable job. If I need better I still have the negatives.

 

[1934hotrod]

Very timely I've been tossing the idea of sending them out around. This going to be a one time deal. Thanks I will look into that one.

 

[lifesmith]

Greeting looking for information from anyone using a slide scanner. Do not want a stand alone with memory.

Trying to find a quality scanner that will run as a Peripheral.

Any advice is welcome thanks in advance.

HOW I SCANNED THOUSANDS OF SLIDES

I am a photographer and film maker and I have done a lot of slide scans over the years and this year I had the pleasure to use what I think is the best slide scanner I have ever used.

There is a company in Brighton Ontario that has high performance slide scanners that they rent out. Before I rented it I researched the unit. Everything I have read about the unit was impressive.

Our Studio is a collective studio that is used by a number of photographers and film makers. The rental department at Our Studio is really for its member photographers and operates more like a non profit service, so it has better rates than Vistek in Toronto but unfortunately they dont list all the gear they have to rent online.

So I only found out about this unit by word of mouth when asked to archive a large collection of slides for a client. One of their members told me about this high speed scanner that he had used that was amazing. So I went to see it at their studio. You can find this outfit by the way at http://ourstudio.ca/rentals/

So after a bit or research, I rented this unit for $450 per day from them and got thousands of high res scans done over a weekend.

I was speaking to the manager there a Peter Ross and he said that they have a spare silde scanner that could be for sale. His number is 888-844-3444 x5

This is an Automated High Res High Performance Slide Scanner that normally sells for $4400 Canadian plus shipping but I noticed that they have just posted an ad to sell this one for $2795.
http://www.kijiji.ca/v-camera-camco...ro/1278474384?enableSearchNavigationFlag=true

It is a Slidesnap Pro's SlideSnap rapid slide scanner. Designed for the medium to large production level slide scanning operation and used by hundreds of photographers, universities and service providers worldwide.

I was told by Peter that it was purchased as a back up unit and had spent its life waiting to back up their production unit which as it turned out, has never broken down. So its In good condition with low or no operating time and guaranteed working.

Here are the Features:

-Up to 30 slides per minute (1,800 slides per hour).
-Autonomous batch operation for up to 140 slides.
-Adjustable mount allows for optical alignment to eliminate planar foreshortening.
-LED backlit (5000k)
-Universal DSLR compatibility
-100% solid state switching

You Can Read More: http://slidesnappro.com/product/slidesnap-pro/

I just mounted my camera with a macro lens and it took me a few minutes to set it up but then i was ready to produce at 30 high res scans per minute. When I calculated in my prep time and loading the slide trays in the scanner I was averaging about 1000 slide scans per hour. Needless to say it was awesome!

Great quality and very fast. I could not ask for more! It took me longer to sort the scans then to make them. So for me this set a new bar for slide scanning and it turned out to be an excellent experience.

Reply Reply with quote More options