Scanner or what???

[CEK40]

Good Morning All...

First let me say to you all, thank you so much for your wonderful volumes of information on this board.

I would love to get some advice on the best way to get all the photographs I have scanned so I will have a copy of them just in case. I inherited my grandmothers and parents old photographs, and my DH has all his families photographs as well.

I know you can take them to various places and they will scan them for you, but this is quite costly for a one time process. I know they make the portable photo, negitave, slide scanners but not sure how good the quality of those are. Then you have the flatbed photo scanners. I have read and searched the options but am really not sure what is the best route to take. So many choices to consider.

I want to get something that I can use again and again if needed and I have SO MANY photographs and negatives that I don't want to loose and would love to share with my children and grandchildren. My DH also does family history and this would be great for him as well.

Any advice or personal experience would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
CK in VA

 

[jcb]

a good scanner will have a high dpi. Make sure you have one that will scan transparencies/negatives (some don't). That will require special negative holders and a separate light source (over the scanner bed).

I have been happy with my HP scanjet that has 4800 dpi. I have used it to scan old photo and negatives.

Beyond that it is a matter of the software. I expect you will want software that will auto-correct faded photos, change contrast/brightness (particularly black and white photos) and will let you easily touch up spots on photos.

 

[photo_chick]

I have an older scanner, an Epson Perfection 4870, that I use to scan things like this. It handles photos, slides, and various film sizes because is has an 8x10 transparency unit in the lid.

The key to scanning any of this type of material yourself is knowing how to scan it. At least on my scanner, the auto modes don't get the job done sufficiently. I have to go in and adjust the exposure and other things myself (admittedly, that could just be me being nit picky). Also, understanding the relationship between DPI, inches and pixels is very helpful (dpi x inches = pixels ) because it will tell you what DPI you need to scan at.

It is very time consuming to do it yourself, but you do save a lot of money if you have a lot of items to scan. And for me, I know that things are scanned the way I want them scanned.

 

[manning]

Canon Canoscan 8800F

http://www.adorama.com/ICACS8800F.html

That's all you need for what you want to do.

 

[Poohbear5]

Don't know about the scanner but my mom took a few hundred photos to Ritz to be scanned and put on disk. Nearly all the photos had a streak through them (looked like a film scratch). Otherwise, it was pretty quick and she was glad to have a cd for each of her kids.