Scan Negatives or photo?

[Pooh2]

I have several larges boxes of negatives. I am debating wether to continue to store them or to ditch them with plans to scan photos as needed instead.
Does everyone hang onto the negatives?

 

[Patrick in Oregon]

I would lean toward keeping my negatives. But I have a weird thing about hanging on to original hard-copies of things.

I've read about people scanning their old negatives so they can store and/or manipulate pictures they haven't seen in a long time, but then keeping their negatives in case technology continues to advance and you have to re-scan your negatives. Maybe someday they will be able to 3D-render a 2D image lol.

I would imagine scanning from the negative is "better" than scanning a photo. Probably depends on how well the negatives were stored too.

 

[cpbjgc]

If you have a scanner that can scan film, you can get a much better result from scanning a negative instead of a print. I would hang on to the negatives, get a good scanner (not one of these). I have an Epson V500 which I purchased at a much better price than advertised in the link. There are other good brands as well (Canon as an example) that can give you excellent results. It's a good rainy-day project to scan some negatives, especially ones you might want to print.

 

[Pooh2]

If you have a scanner that can scan film, you can get a much better result from scanning a negative instead of a print. I would hang on to the negatives, get a good scanner (not one of these). I have an Epson V500 which I purchased at a much better price than advertised in the link. There are other good brands as well (Canon as an example) that can give you excellent results. It's a good rainy-day project to scan some negatives, especially ones you might want to print.

Mmmm. that Epsom scanner looks remarkably like the one stored in my closet and I paid about the same price. Will have to dig it out and try scanning negatives.

Do you just leave them in the sleeve to scan, or do you line them all up without the sleeve?

 

[cpbjgc]

Just a warning - the V500 is a photo scanner, and I don't know if you would get a good result if yours is not a photo scanner.

As for the negatives, the V500 came with a tray that is for holding negatives. For 35mm film you would remove the negatives from the sleeve and put them in the tray to scan them. Just a couple quick examples of scans from 35 mm film:

 

[manning]

The advantage of scanning from a negative is that it is first generation. quality decreases with each generation.

If you are wondering what generation is:

Negative is first generation
Picture made from negative is 2nd generation
Picture scanned from picture is 3rd generation etc. etc.

 

[LittleMissMagic]

I work for a photographer, and we get a lot of business, especially towards the holidays, asking for us to restore and digitalize old photos. We always ask if they have the negative because we can get so much more quality (and often a less weathered image) from the negative. Prints tend to fade and discolor over time. It's a lot more Photoshop work than scanning in negatives is.

That being said, we do have a negative scanner - ours is Epson and functions as a regular scanner, but has an insert for scanning negatives which works wonderfully (I forget the model number, but it's at least four years old, so I doubt you'd want to go with that one).

I'd either keep the negatives or go ahead through the long process of digitalizing and backing up everything (you should probably go ahead and do this, even if you decide to keep the negatives).

 

[photo_chick]

I have several larges boxes of negatives. I am debating wether to continue to store them or to ditch them with plans to scan photos as needed instead.
Does everyone hang onto the negatives?

Scan the negative and not the prints.

On the V500 that was mentioned... I've used the V500 and the V700 both for negatives. You can easily get professional quality scans with them if you know the basics of how to scan a negative (setting the exposure and all that fun stuff). It's not difficult but it is time consuming.