Scanning Colour Slides to PC

[ATNotts]

Can anyone help with hardware / sofware suggestions to enable me to copy my colour slides to the PC?

Thanks,

Andrew

[Dop]

There are an increasing number of flatbed scanners which now include film carriers to scan negatives and slides, although they're usually not said to be quite as good as dedicated film scanners.

I've got an Epson F3200, which has carriers for 35mm film strips, 35mm slides, medium format film, 5"x4" film and 6"x4" prints. Admittedly I'm probably never going to use the 5"x4" carrier but I do do the odd bit of medium format (and if I find them there are probably lots of medium format negatives in my Dad's house I could scan in).
I do have a lot of slides from the late 70's early 80s, and this scans in eight at a time, after you've put them in the carrier and clipped them into place. I get reasonable results, especially after I've run them through Photoshop Elements (I don't want to spend £££lots on full Photoshop, and Elements does most stuff I actually need) to tidy them up.

But that's just one suggestion, I'm sure there'll be others. Also the photo mags you can find in your local newsagent often have reviews of such things, so really it depends on how much you want to spend!

[Jet II]

depends on how good a quality you want - for the best quality you cannot beat a dedicated slide scanner, the flatbed scanners with a light in the lid are ok for general snaps.

for a dedicated slide scanner I would reccommend a late version Nikon with ICE (Scratch & Dust removal)

for software you cannot beat Photoshop - although Elements is generally good enough for consumers.

Basically it comes down to how good a quality output you need.

[Mac the Knife]

Agree with Dop

If you only have a small number of slides then one of the flatbeds that has a slide adapter will be fine - results may need a bit of tidying up though.

If you have more, then a dedicated slide scanner is far better and faster, but pricey. The Nikon Coolscan V ED is the dogs bollocks at around 500GBP - the Super Coolscan 5000ED is even better but with it's auto slide feeder add-on don't expect any change from a grand!

You might consider checking around for the many imaging businesses that offer a slide scanning service - it might be worth your while (and a lot less hassle). Here in SA they are ridiculously expensive, but they sound much more reasonable in the UK.

:ok:

[IO540]

I have used flat bed scanners, a Canon FS2710, and now have a Nikon 5000ED with an SF-210 bulk feeder.

From my photo heyday in the 1970s and onwards I had accumulated about 5000 slides, and the best commercial quote I got was 50p a slide to scan them in. One quote was £10 each; that was using an oil-immersed scan process which eliminates any scratches. Buying the Nikon stuff at £1000 paid for itself twice over on this one job alone, and the 50-slide feeder makes it viable to do lots of them. The Nikon software is truly crap though; it only just about hangs in there...

Before getting the 5000ED I compared some quite "difficult" slides with another Nikon, about £5000, and could not tell the difference.

I scan to 24-bit lossless TIFFs (about 70MB each) then using ACDSEE I rotate any sideways ones upright, then run a batch process in Photoshop to convert them to Jpegs (still no resolution loss); final filesize about 5MB. I use PS for the Jpeg conversion because it has the best algorithm.

I would be glad to do a favour to other chaps here (send me the slides and I will scan them in) although if somebody wanted 100s of slides to be scanned I would have to charge for it :)

My old FS2710 may be for sale, but you can pick them up on Ebay for peanuts anyway. It is very good indeed, though visibly not as good as the Nikon one. Just extremely slow, feeding them in one at a time.

[MyData]

Hello all. I've just purchased the Nikon Coolscan V ED (about £440 was what I paid) and it really is wonderful. I've used flatbed scanners previously with the slide / negative adaptors but the results are nothing like the ones I'm getting here.

I'm fortunate to work from home so can have my home PC being fed in the background as I work. In the past 3 days I've scanned 250 negatives. It is a SLOW process and I look at the piles of stuff still to do. It has brought to life some very old and tired pictures and the images look as fresh as if they had been taken today.

I've also bought the IX240 adaptor for some old APS stuff. Haven't got to use that yet though.

£440 seems a lot for a single device, but my plan is to sell it to the local camera dealership or even eBay once I've migrated my slide / neg collection (by April time I hope!).

A question for the panel. Sorting through my old shoeboxes of photos I realise that I have a LOT of missing negatives. Can someone recommend a very good quality flatbed scanner that can handle photographs really well and incorporate some kind of ICE filtering?

And finally: I've a few strips of B&W negatives. These are just not being handled at all well. The effects come out 'posterised' is the best descrption. All black and white with harsh edge detection. No greyscales. I've tried all the input / colour filters. The various toolbox options but can't get B&W scans to work. Any Coolscan owners out there with suggestions?

[Loose rivets]

We had a thread on this about a year ago, quite a lot of info on that.

I mentioned some success with snapping prints and negs with a D SLR, believe it or not. Got some quite good results. With negs, the back light was very crittical however, and for the experiment I used the lid light of my scanner.

Pegging up to the window gave the best light, but needs a sheet about four feet from the glass to eliminate the pattern from trees etc. Tripod and timer were essential of course.

It takes one heck of a scanner to create a 4 M file in a fraction of a second.

Using a cheap scanner Epson 3170 from Epson refurbished sales ($70), I got results that were nearly as good as a more expencive unit.... $450 ish. Trouble with photography, is that 'nearly' isn't good enough and the lust for better kit is a somewhat cronic condition is it not?:hmm:

[IO540]

Mydata

Have you thought about the "obvious" and scanned them as colour, and then ran a batch job in Photoshop to convert them to B&W?

PS does most image conversions better than anything else out there - especially the crud*y Nikon software.

Re flatbeds, I would buy the best A4 scanner you can find. They are so cheap now it's a struggle to find one that's too expensive. I've recently scanned all the old family pics (back to c. 1910) from photo albums to TIFFs, using an Epson 3200 but I don't think that one is current anymore. It was about £300. The result is excellent, though not as good as the original photos in the range of contrast. I don't know if there are any A4 flatbed scanners on the retail market with a contrast range matching negative film + paper.

There must be a lot of people with expensive slide scanners, with their slide collections all scanned, and with the scanners gathering dust :) My 5000ED has hardly got used in over a year. I suppose I should put it on Ebay before it gets too old.