Scanner

[canman]

Now that it is summer vacation and I have some time on my hands, I decided to tackle a really big job. I want to take all the photo negatives and transfer them to my computer and then burn them onto cd's. I'm wondering if any of you have any advice as to which machine is best for this job. I was looking at a Canoscan 5200F, which looks nice, or there is also Epson Gt- f550. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Also is the quality as good as they advertise?

[gkanai]

I went with the low-end Nikon film scanner. I forget the model name but I think it was around 60.000 yen.

120MB files so get a backup HDD too...

[jingai]

Try doing a search on this topic on Photo.net.

What do you want the pictures for? Printing to inkjets? Web use? Looking at on your computer? You need a much better scanner if you want to turn these images into prints.

The state of the art film scanners are the Nikon Coolscan Ved and the Minolta 5400. The Canon Canoscan4000US is older and the Minolta DualScanIV is cheaper but has no automatic dust removal (big time saver).

I'm going to get a Coolscan V whenever they come down in price a bit, as I want to do my own printing.

[jingai]

Also, you might want to rethink the project. Scanning is quite time-consuming if you care about the quality of the results, and scanning in all your negatives (how many? hundreds? thousands?) could be a huge use of time. Do you really need EVERYTHING?


Try these resources, too:
http://www.scantips.com

http://www.photographic.com/digitalperipherals/154/index.html

http://www.computer-darkroom.com/home.htm

[Blah Pete]

I have seen some A4 size scanners lately that come with a plastic guide to scan negatives and slides. Has anybody had positive results with these or are the specialty negative only scanners like Minolta much better?

[kotatsuneko]

um, I also have a good 8 or 900 images for a possible art installation in the future..

currently my scanner is officially a piece of shit (epson perfection 1250)

it's so sloooow bung paper in, checks the image type, warms up, ...... scans image.... finally comes up with the preview... save start again..

it takes too long!

i have a firewire 800 card that so far only the bigger disk uses.. does anyone know of any affordable or up and coming firewire 800 scanners?

so far I have seen a lot of canon and epson scanners using usb 2, but is the process really any faster than usb 1?

i`d like to find the guy who got me "into" computers claiming they were "cool" and kick the bastad