My parents were around in the 70s/80s, so naturally they have dozens of slides and hundreds of photos. I remember a bunch of ads for services digitizing slides and negatives from a few years back, and I’m hoping I didn’t miss the boat on that.
Anyone tried one, and was happy/unhappy with the results? Did you get better results from slides or negatives? Back when I heard of a few places overseas, but some shipments had some mishaps - any place offer insurance for that kind of thing?
Or has anyone tried one of those dedicated negative scanners I’ve seen for sale?
Back in the day I had a real low-end film scanner (A HP photosmart S20). The results were OK, considerably better than throwing prints on a flatbed, but it broke and I didn’t buy another one. Frankly, scanning decently (high resolution and fixing the resulting images) sucks and take an incredible amount of time. Now I send it out and let low wage Indian labor do it, and they have a lot better equipment than I can afford. I assume they do have insurance, but the problem is your pictures have no real monetary value (I believe the liability limit is $100.00), having said that I’ve never had a problem with either the Indian place I use (Scancafe) or the American place (DigMyPics), which costs considerably more and give slightly better results, IMHO.
If you get on ScanCafe’s email list they send 20% off or so or even better offers all the time.
I’ve been looking into this for a while myself and although I haven’t really researched it thoroughly, there are at least 2 things I know are important.
color depth - I think think this is the right term. What I mean by it is the number of bits used to encode the color tone. I think 24 bit is standard, but I’m pretty sure the human eye can discern finer gradations although 2^24 is a butt load (>16M) of tones so I won’t swear to that.
resolution - this seems to be expressed either in MP (megapixels) or dpi (dots per inch). For dpi, I think you’re supposed to assume that is both on the vertical and horizontal axis unless you’re told otherwise.
For most good quality film, I think the resolution maxes out at around 24MP or roughly 5000 dpi. But people will argue this both up and down and they’re all probably right to some degree. The silver nitride (???) clusters on an emulsion don’t really correspond to digital pixels, so it’s hard to say what “resolution” really means in the context of film. However I seem to recall that past about 24MP, you don’t really extract much more useful information unless maybe you’re scanning old U-2 spyplane footage taken with Zeiss optics.
I would advise that you attempt it yourself, if you have the time. There is DIY setups for use with digital cameras. Normally it would be a DSLR if you have one, but some of the information available states that there would not be a reason to preclude using a Point and Shoot.
You would try a few shots first, and invert the negative.
Worse comes to worse, you could outsource it to some one who is going to use the above method and charge you.
My opinion is that 5000 DPI is too much for consumer film, unless it’s slow, high quality slide film shot with decent lighting and optics. I had slides and negatives scanned at various resolutions and found that 3200 was about the max for my slide film, and somewhat less than that for negatives. Also, if you outsource it they’re going to use something more sophisticated than taking pictures with a DSLR. The best places like DigMyPics will use Nikon 9000s, which cost thousands of dollars used.
I use a service called Scan Cafe. I an VERY happy with their quality. Turn around time is very long, on the order of 6 to 8 weeks.
I was doing my own scans on a dedicated film scanner, but the time involved per neg or slide can really add up. I would rather wait for the mail than be tied to cleaning the scanner, cleaning the neg, cleaning the file, etc… over and over and over… (dust is a bitch for scans)
MdCastleman: That’s interesting. You know of course I wasn’t suggesting the use of a DSLR. Scanners are rated in dpi and MP too. The dpi though I think is usually an interpolated rather than a raw number, but I would have to check on that.
Anyway, so you’re saying that roughly 10MP is the most usable information that can be extracted from a 35mm slide or negative. Hmmm. Sounds a bit low, but you have first hand experience so I defer.
What about compression? Do you get RAW, TIFF or other lossless images back or do they give you something in lossy compressed format like JPEG. Hopefully you get both since they both have their uses.
My Scan Cafe files (also made with Nikon scanners) come back anywhere from 5MP to 25MP, depending on the original. Old chromes from a very simple 50s vintage model yielded the smallest files, my chromes from high end lenses later in my shooting career had the largest files. All of them came back as JPEGs, as I could not find a raw file option on their order form. I prefer working in raw.