We’ve got thousands of 35MM negatives that are in various boxes around the house. I’d like to turn some of them into j-pegs. Probably 1 or 2 percent. And I’l probably send those out once I figure out which ones are keepers and which ones are just not worth saving.
In your humble, but valued and esteemed opinion, what is the best viewer or scanner with which to view these negatives, so that we can separate them? Borrowed a friends Wolverine Digital Converter and it’s not nearly adequate.
If we are talking about literally thousands of images and such a small “keeper” rate, consider obtaining a light box and a loupe magnifier to look directly at the negatives. You can find light boxes for pretty cheap ($20-30).
I bought a Canon Canoscan 9000f Mark II back-lit flat bed scanner. It will scan a strip of six negatives at once, and has better resolution than most of the dedicated negative scanners in the $200 price range. It also scans slides and prints.
I thought an expert might chime in. I certainly am not one, but the Nikon Coolscan line of negative scanners was very well regarded a few years ago when I was doing a lot of work with film. Professional machines specifically for 35mm negatives.
Also if you have a DSLR, good results can be had by using a “slide duplicator” attachment. For negatives and especially for color negatives you will need to apply filters in Photoshop or equivalent to get a positive image. But compared to a flatbed scanner which takes minutes to scan each image, it is super fast to pop a slide in there and hit the shutter. Here is an old photo of my grandfather. This requires a certain amount of fiddling and know-how to get the best results.
For actual archive scanning, I recommend scancafe.com. Sign up for an account and they’ll start sending you coupons, you should end up paying around 50% of their already pretty low list price.
I had some slides to go through, and for the prices to scan (roughly .20$/slide) I erred on the side of sending more than I expected to keep. I actually just held them up to a diffuse light source to get an idea if there were people in photo that I wanted pictures of, and if so the slide went into the “scan” pile.
How much detail to do you need in order to decide if the slide is a keeper?
Since you mention negatives, let me recommend an inexpensive lightbox and one of the free smartphone apps that lets you look at a color negative as a positive. That will help you quickly make a first cut of negs to scan.
I’m with awldune about the slide duplicator. I’ve used them in the past for slide to negative conversions, before digital cameras, and they can work very well. And as he mentions, faster than most scanners.
I do use my Epson flatbed scanner these days for copying both slides and reflective images, but if I had more than a few at a time to work with I’d probably go back to the slide duplicator.
If you do try a slide duplicator with your negative strips, you may need to build a carrier out of cardstock (e.g., cereal box) to hold the film flat for best results. Generally duplicators are designed to hold mounted slides.
Film Scanner Lite is the one I have. I confess I’ve only used it occasionally.
I guess the non-Lite version is intended for actually making “scans” from negs on a lightbox. The Android equivalent is apparently Photo Negative Scanner or Helmut.
And Google now offers the free app PhotoScan for Android and iOS. That supposedly uses some wizardry (taking and combining four different images) to do amazingly good image captures from negs or slides.
