dagray
04-16-2015, 03:35 PM
I see threads on other boards once in a while asking "which scanner is best to scan my slides"... and the answer for me is "none of the above".
My reason for this answer is the Nikon film and digital scanners or others of that quality will cost a few hundred dollars to get anything that puts out a quality rendition of the original, and then you have this thing called "time".
How much time do you have to sit and scan hundreds or thousands of negatives, slides, or in my case a combination of both?
The solution I have found that is relatively fast and cost effective is to outsource this task so that you can go on with other tasks throughout your day.
I took my slides and negatives to Costco who offers this service at a very reasonable price to scan your slides/negatives. This is NOT a one hour service so they do it after hours when they aren't dealing with other customers. The quality of the images you receive on the disks is excellent (at least as good as the negative or slide).
Yes you will have to go in to the image with editing software if you want to make a professional quality print to resize the image and increase the resolution from 72dpi to 300dpi to have a viable image for the printing services to give you the best quality, but you only have to do that for images you intend to print, or enhance for sharing on the web.
The below image is of The Painted Hills in the John Day Fossil bed area just outside John Day, OR taken 20 years ago with either a Pentax Asahi Honeywell Spotmatic, or a Pentax ME Super.
http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb277/lizardman_u/landscape/PaintedHills.jpg (http://s211.photobucket.com/user/lizardman_u/media/landscape/PaintedHills.jpg.html)
This image had very little editing (some sharpening, some color correction, and resized) from the scan Costco made.
Dave
My reason for this answer is the Nikon film and digital scanners or others of that quality will cost a few hundred dollars to get anything that puts out a quality rendition of the original, and then you have this thing called "time".
How much time do you have to sit and scan hundreds or thousands of negatives, slides, or in my case a combination of both?
The solution I have found that is relatively fast and cost effective is to outsource this task so that you can go on with other tasks throughout your day.
I took my slides and negatives to Costco who offers this service at a very reasonable price to scan your slides/negatives. This is NOT a one hour service so they do it after hours when they aren't dealing with other customers. The quality of the images you receive on the disks is excellent (at least as good as the negative or slide).
Yes you will have to go in to the image with editing software if you want to make a professional quality print to resize the image and increase the resolution from 72dpi to 300dpi to have a viable image for the printing services to give you the best quality, but you only have to do that for images you intend to print, or enhance for sharing on the web.
The below image is of The Painted Hills in the John Day Fossil bed area just outside John Day, OR taken 20 years ago with either a Pentax Asahi Honeywell Spotmatic, or a Pentax ME Super.
http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/bb277/lizardman_u/landscape/PaintedHills.jpg (http://s211.photobucket.com/user/lizardman_u/media/landscape/PaintedHills.jpg.html)
This image had very little editing (some sharpening, some color correction, and resized) from the scan Costco made.
Dave