slide/negative scanner

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hi. i'm looking into getting a scanner so that i can put all my 35mm stuff onto my computer. i usually only get picture cd's when i get stuff developed but i guess it'll save me money to just get negatives. is it cheaper? where is the best place to go about getting stuff done process only(cheap too)? what scanner should i look out for either second hand or something i can save up for. maximum cost about 100. can i get a scanner under 100 that will be any good and get me high res scans? so many questions
 
a year or 2 ago I got a Nikon Coolscan III for about £70. Can probably get a IV or a V for similar money now.

IME it's only about a £1 or £1.50 extra for prints ontop of the negs, however if you are using positive (slide) film then it's MUCH cheaper just to get the slides back, and don't bother getting prints.

I used to use a great shop which got taken over a year or so ago by Jessops. But very few places actually do slides on site, most will send them away to a lab somewhere.

If you have a small bit of space for chemicals/drying etc you can do B/W film and develop it fairly cheaply. Then just scan the negs in. By purchasing film in bulk you can get it very very cheaply.
 
i was thinking about doing my own black and white, but i'm not really a big black and white fan:). i've not used slide before but i would consider using it lots if the use of a scanner brings the cost down. also that 1-1.50 adds up! so eventually the slide thing would have paid for itself :)! i'll check out this nikon coolscan
 
Well, I'm not current on digi print costs, but I beleive it's some where around 8-10p a print? a 36exp at 8p a 7x5 print is £2.88, so at it can be cheaper to get a set of prints if you know you will want most of them, if you know you'll only need a few of the prints then obviously it would be a waste to pay for them. I think it was about £4 to get a slide film processed, and a little more for a colour film. (about £6 for developing and printing)

Buy film in bulk and it's less than 20p a roll.
 
genie imaging in London costs £1.50 (ex VAT) a roll, 35mm or 120, e6, c41 or b&w - they offer a postal/courier service and processing turn around is 24 hrs

peak imaging in Sheffield costs £3.35 (inc VAT) a roll, 35mm or 120, e6, c41 or b&w - they also offer a postal/courier service, general turn around last time I used them was 4 days (freepost service, but it's second class, you can pay extra on postage and the turn around will be quicker).
 
Well I was paying over the odds, there, perhaps it was a couple of quid for prints. I never shopped around, that's just what I was paying on the high street.

Anyway, I just remembered that on the times I did get prints on to a CD the quality was terrible, they were just like scans of the prints, rather than scans of the negs. Check with the guy as to what they do, becuase obviously a scan of a print in almost worthless from a quality perspective.
 
If you want everything to end up in high quality digital, scanning is not the way to go. A DSLR will work out cheaper, and loads more convenient.

I still have a high end slide scanner (minolta 5400) and the results are very good, though it takes ages to scan, and there is a lot of skill involved in getting the best out of the scans. It's not really suitable for batch scanning either as the time it takes per scan can be a long time (hours at the the highest quality levels). These scanners can still reach £500 on the 'Bay, so sound out of your league.

There are some batch scanning services, that came up in previous discussions, I'm not sure of the prices now, but I think that they where in the region of £1-2 per slide and I think that is a good price.

As to cheaper slide scanners, I've never been impressed with anything I've used. Though if photo CD's are good enough you might be OK. if you search for this in the forum search you will come across some old discussions of a similar topic. My personal recommendation is that I've never been impressed with scans from anything but a dedicated film scanner, though there are some high end flat beds that seem attractive(EPSON v700), but they cost lot.
 
aztechnology said:
If you want everything to end up in high quality digital, scanning is not the way to go. A DSLR will work out cheaper, and loads more convenient.
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Yes, but not if you already have film. Or if you WANT to experiment with processing and developing. For B/W in the home or Slide - yes, for normal colour negs developed by someone else, well.... sometimes it not always about the cost or convienence. :)

aztechnology said:
I still have a high end slide scanner (minolta 5400) and the results are very good, though it takes ages to scan, and there is a lot of skill involved in getting the best out of the scans. It's not really suitable for batch scanning either as the time it takes per scan can be a long time (hours at the the highest quality levels). These scanners can still reach £500 on the 'Bay, so sound out of your league.
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Yes, it's not a fast process, especially compared to taking a digital photo in the first place, scanning is a black art unto itself, but i'm sure of someone was serious they could get a good workflow going. The Nikons have neg strip adaptors and motorised loading o you can batch scan 6 negs at a time. without intervention. However, usually for best results intervention on each individual scan is required...

aztechnology said:
There are some batch scanning services, that came up in previous discussions, I'm not sure of the prices now, but I think that they where in the region of £1-2 per slide and I think that is a good price.
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Sure, depending what the OP objective is, if it's just to get some old slides digitised, handing it to a professional scanning bureau maybe the cheapest and easit in terms of time and cost, but as a learnign excercise, something different, experiment DIY, OP may benefit from doing it himself.

aztechnology said:
As to cheaper slide scanners, I've never been impressed with anything I've used. Though if photo CD's are good enough you might be OK. if you search for this in the forum search you will come across some old discussions of a similar topic. My personal recommendation is that I've never been impressed with scans from anything but a dedicated film scanner, though there are some high end flat beds that seem attractive(EPSON v700), but they cost lot.
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Yes, I'd agree don't waste time on a flatbed with adaptors and things, while they may work and be good enough for one offs etc, a proper film scanner works much better, and gives a much better scan. I looked at this and found a great review literally scrutinising a flatbed vs a film scanner. Summary - flatbed damn good especially for the money for what you get, but for exclusively film, a film scanner wins. The main thing is if it's just negs, a lower end scanner will do, but for slides a scanner with a higher DMAX is required to extract all the detail from the darker areas. The Nikon Coolscans are very well regarded, and were very expensive when they came out. And some of the newer ones still go for hundreds of pounds on ebay.
 
I dont really want to move to digital. I prefer film and like using my film cameras. i'm not really a big black and white film fan either so dont really want to get into processing that. i originally thought about the scanner in relation to processing my own colour photos. but it doesn't look like doing that is cheaper or easy from home? i've been hoping for something better than cd quality really. cd quality has been fine sometimes but its never really good enough is it? 'im really just looking to reduce costs on my photo taking, without having to go digital :). developing my own colour photos from home and then scanning them would be the dream but it seems like this is expensive with colour and really complicated?
 
It sounds to me like you will have to look at the negative scanner route. It might be cheaper now that some of the film scanners are available second hand, but there is a learning curve to scanning, and many of the web resources I used have gone quiet.

Reducing costs on taking photo's is hard. I spent over £800 trying to cut costs by scanning and printing, that looking back, would have been better spent on a DSLR body.

Developing at home isn't too bad, I do occasionally still get the B+W stuff out, but the chemicals for Colour are a more nasty and need more careful disposal, and I don't have a colour enlarger. It is another skill though that will take time to develop (no pun intended), and you will need to practice.

It also takes time too. I think on a good evening, I might be able to produce 6 quality prints, of a reasonable size, if I don't have to do too much to them, and have developed the negs previously. I could probably get though 50 similar prints if it's all digital.

The only way to do it cheaply is process only, then only print the enlargements you want. It's almost impossible to asses a colour neg, so you will have to go to colour positives (slide film) if you are not there already and assess each slide on a light table using a good loupe (which can cost a packet). Process paid slides are going to be about 30p a shot. Then scanning (at least £2 for a reasonable scan) and enlargement costs, it all adds up quickly.

I don't want to put you off, I still enjoy film and there's nothing like the magic of seeing a image appear in a developer bath, but before you spend real cash on a scanner etc, You should see if you can have a go somewhere and see if you like it enough to justify it.

I'll leave the "prefer film" comment alone for another day :D
 
I love my DSLR but i also still prefer the look that film has. I only really bother with black + white and slides. I only have a film scanner to enable me to put film images in amongst digital images in slideshows etc. I don’t tend to use the scanner to give me a file for printing. If i wish to print an image from film i will go to my enlarger or use a company that sill manually prints photographs. There is still a difference between a film image that has been professionally scanned and printed against one that has been enlarged via an enlarger, I cannot say what it is but I can see it. This is not a case of I hate digital, since I love to use that too, and then spend hours trying to make the pictures look like film.
 
hi, bringing up my old thread here.. just wondering if anyone has any opinions on the epson v200. theres a couple of buy it now's on ebay for about 69.99 and two auction ones. does anybody have any experience using these and the kind of results they would get? obviously they wont be as good as a dedicated scanner (i've been watching some minoltas but they are going above my budget and apparently dont work with vista). I dont really take photos that require 'amazing quality', i like silly lo-fo cameras and dont mind grain, but at the same time i like my slr and have just bought some slide film. so i do want reasonably good results!.
 
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don't know about that particular scanner but in all the tests I have seen, when I was looking at this a few years ago, the ONLY advantage of a flatbed film scanner over a conventional Film scanner is that you can scan larger than 35mm peices of film.

If you will only be scanning 35 mm film , get a dedicated 35mm film scanner, especially since you plan to shoot slides, which have a very large dynamic range and can hold a lot of detail in the blacks. The film scanners are faster and easier to work with.

If you think you'll miss the ability to scan prints and things, just get a £20 canon Lide25 flatbed as well.

However if you think you might want to scan 4x5, or larger then a flat bed film scanner may work out better for you.

See if you can find some test scans on the review sites.

0.02.

edit Heres a very informative link. Dated 04, but I think a lot of it probably still holds, or would benefit from further investigation. Should give some food for thought. See if you can find a similar more upto date article. http://danandsherree.com/2004/08/11/scanning_slides_and_.php
 
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I upgraded myself from DSLRs to almost sole film user since the last couple of years. I use an Epson 4990 to scan from 135 to 8x10, slide or self-made B&W. I don't shoot reversal at all.
The scan gives you the 'richness' of film and the advantage of digital post processing, it's really, to me, the best of both worlds.

The flatbeds are not 'ideal' for the 35mm, mostly due to flatness of film; but you can still get very nice sharp 6 megapixels or so out of a 35mm frame. If you want more resolution, you can always shoot with a bigger camera !

I wrote a B&W scanning 'how to' workflow that tries to gives the best quality versus file size some time ago : http://www.oomz.net/bw_workflow/
As a background, I am a digital signal processing engineer, I know where the signal is kept, and where it's lost...
 
on ebay with 5 minutes to go on a minolta dimage dual scanner, within my budget, the internet cut out :(. these minolta dedicate scanners seem to pop up quite regularly, so i'm going to keep watching over the next few weeks to see if i can get one at a reasonble price.
 
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