35mm Negatives

whitecrook · 10 Dec 2013 at 14:50

I got one of those cheap £20 quid slide / film scanners. It's basically a webcam inside a box with a backlight. The quality is, to be generous, ****e. It's really smeared, looks even worse than a cheap Point and shoot. Also, it does auto expose and I couldn't get it to lock the exposure so for scanning black and white film it was very hit an miss. On the plus side it's great and quick if you just want a digi copy of your film to bang up on the web or email etc. I haven't printed any of these scans out yet.

So I got a Epson V500 ( recently they had a deal on direct for 152 squid) and the quality is very nice indeed. My black and white looks awesome and there is a nice level of detail. I have yet to compare to my old coolscan III as hooking up to a machine with SCSI and winxp or less is a total ballache. And I can't afford the price of a SCSI->FW Adaptor. I imagine the LSIII Will give my slightly better quality for 35mm, BUT the epson is more handy, and can scan 6x4.5 6x6 etc which I have a few hundred of waiting to be scannned.

Nexus · 10 Dec 2013 at 21:59

Boots actually used to be pretty highly rated back in the early 2000s before digital took over. I remember reading Which? type reviews which put them top for the high street labs.

I don't think labs feature so much in their stores now anyway, especially the smaller ones. Instead they are replaced with self-service kiosks.

I've actually got some film negative and undeveloped rolls I'd like to do something with one day, but I get the impression its going to be a bit more pricey these days, so may be with going the DIY route.

DampDog · 12 Dec 2013 at 12:32

Well I popped into my local Boots and made some enquires and getting negatives scanned is much cheaper than I expected. It's around £2 to have set of negatives scanned (up to 28 images) and £2 to have them stuck on a CD. Once you have the images, their normal rates for enlargements/prints apply. I will give them a go at the weekend. If the negatives have been cut into singles it's 30 odd pence each.

Logsi · 14 Dec 2013 at 10:08

Invertigo said:
Another vote for the Coolscan, if its within budget. At uni we have multiple Epsom flatbeds, a couple of Coolscans and then a Hasselblad Flextight. Obviously the 'blad is by far the best, but unless you have a spare £10k+ to blow then its a bit expensive

The Coolscan is still much much better than the Epsoms though

Where did you go to Uni?

It sounds very much like the setup that was at mine. Strange is that the person giving us inductions on the equipment also wrongly pronounced Epson as Epsom...

Would love a coolscan like they had at Uni, unfortunately it was a 9000 so they go for 3 grand.