digitizing Slides and negatives

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/b...intedHills.jpg

This image had very little editing (some sharpening, some color correction, and resized) from the scan Costco made.

Dave

That image has a great painterly feel to it. I do not have the luxury (?) of dealing with slides, but I know many who do and many of them have invested in flat beds for their slide/negative transfers. Thank you for your explanation and giving us a great alternative.

Thank you Rick. This is between John Day and Mitchell, OR (both very small towns, one you will know you are in a town and the other well just don't blink.

The hills are entirely composed of volcanic ash from thousands of years ago and the layers of color are due to the different metals (red is iron, there is blue and green which is copper), and they are always changing hue, and tint depending on time of year, and how much moisture they have absorbed. One footprint in this soil can last for hundreds of years.

Dave,

What resolution does costco scan your images to? I bought a flatbed Epson V700 and scanned all my negatives and slides a few year ago with pretty good results.

The native resolution is 96 dpi and size is 12.3 x 18.6 inches. In Photoshop I increase resolution and resize and get great prints as the print shop I outsource to needs 300dpi and JPG format (I shoot in RAW).

My Pentax K20d resolution is 72 dpi and 68.9 inches by 43.1 inches (image size before editing in Photoshop). I resize these to 16x24 inches and increase dpi to 300.

Information retrieved by opening unedited images in photoshop and going to "Image Size"

This is an image Costco scanned from a negative with no edits:
http://i211.photobucket.com/albums/b...psed48a93d.jpg

Great Horned Owl with chicks within a few miles of my home in Boardman, OR shot with a Pentax ME Super and Kodak Ectar film ISO 25 using an inexpensive Kalimar 500mm aspherical lens

So the Costco scans are around 2 megapixels. I think the 35mm slides and negatives have more detail than 2 MP. I scanned all my negatives at around 10 megapixels which is probably more detailed than the negatives or slides possess. My guess is that the 35mm slides have around 6-8 megapixels of detail so I wouldn't scan them at any less resolution than that.