Scanning negatives to digital

[spinetnglr]

I know some of you have done this and I was wondering if you could share your experience. I have alot of film negatives I would like to scan and save and in some cases print. I "lost" a signficant number of pictures when I loaned the only prints I had for my nephews memorial service when we lost him in Afghanistan. I think I can pretty much deduce that since its been two years and a number of requests later that I am not getting them back. I still have the negatives and would like to now scan these and also others from years of film shooting, so I can add them to online galleries and replace some holes in my photo albums.

Anyone that can share any experience they have had, especially in regards to the particular scanner used, would be greatly appreciated.

 

[margitmouse]

i'm interested too!

 

[cpbjgc]

I recently acquired an Epson Perfection V500 scanner and find it works great with negatives and slides. It comes with a tray for holding the negatives/slides, and can give you very nice high resolution images. It is not a speed demon, but does give you a good quality image that you can print or do further work on.

As a warning to others, I had initially bought one of the cheaper "box" scanners which is sold as being for negatives and slides only. Three driver updates later, I got it working fine, but found the resolution to be pretty bad - only useful if you wanted smaller web images as opposed to a print. If you just want to throw some scans onto your facebook page, it would be ok. If you are looking for more of an archival quality, then spend the extra cash to get a good quality scanner.

 

[YEKCIM]

Epson V500 user here, too. I'm about halfway through with scanning my entire collection of black and white negatives, going all the way back to my first experience with a camera, back in the mid-60s. I've done the same thing with a number of 35mm, 126 Instamatic and even 110 Instamatic slides.

The V500 does a very good job with both negs and slides in addition, of course, to scanning prints and paper documents. For what it's worth, I've found that 2400dpi is a pretty good resolution for 35mm format film. I use 1200dpi for larger format films such as 127 and 120/220.

Hope that helps.

~Ed

 

[spinetnglr]

Thanks for the replies so far. I know this is something that will take some time to accomplish and I want to do it right the first time.

Anyone else with input for scanning negs to digital??

 

[Bstanley]

Another vote for Epson scanners. I bought a V350 several years ago and it did a good job with quite a pile of 35mm negatives.

The mechanism that scans the negatives on a V350 would take a strip having up to 5 negatives and automatically scan each one into a separate file once the process was started.

 

[Gianna'sPapa]

Like others I use the Epson V500. It works well.

 

[manning]

If still sold the Canon Canoscan 8800 does a pretty good job. Got mine several months ago for arounf $150.00

 

[roseharris]

I am pretty much interested in this.

 

[photo_chick]

I use an older Epson Perfection 4870 Photo (it's like a generation or so before the V500) I've scanned thousands of slides and negatives with it.

The biggest advice I can give is to make sure you scan at high enough resolution for what you need. It saves time and trouble later when you want to make prints. But at the same time, don't go overboard and scan everything at 4800 DPI and end up with ginormous files that slow you down... do the math in the first place. It's much easier.

 

[LordAthens]

I am not a fan of scanning negs at home. It's not something you want to do more than once (especially if you have a large collection of them) and proper equipment is costly. IMO, the least expensive scanner to go with right now would be a used Nikon CoolScan 5000. Those go for ~$1000 USED.

There is a pretty lengthy thread on scanning and photo restoration that I participated in; http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1130792

If you choose not to read it, the cliff notes is; leave negative scanning to the professionals. Unless you're willing to invest a LOT of time (for a good scanner, figure ~30 seconds per frame just for the scan) and a decent chunk of money.

For me to sit down to scan 10 frames takes ~15-20 minutes. This isn't including color correction or other post processing, simply the time to mount the slide, scan it, save it, remount, etc.

35mm stores a tremendous amount of resolution, my advice is to maintain as much of that as possible. Would you go out and buy a 2mp digital camera in this day? Likely not. Don't do the same to your negatives.


My 2c.

 

[photo_chick]

On time... the largest I've done at once was about 2500 35mm slides. It took me the length of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.. the extended versions. So Lord Athens is right on about how time consuming it really is. And it's repetitive. And boring. But my scanner was free (a gift back in '05) so it costs me nothing but time.

 

[fkj2]

Like others I use the Epson V500. It works well.

So you use a flatbed scanner for the slides?

 

[spinetnglr]

Thank you everyone for the responses so far. I am just looking for a reasonably affordable way to recoup lost images of my nephew and some photos from years of shooting film. I thought exploring the possibility of doing it myself rather than sending them out to be done would be the first place to start looking into it. I don't need the resulting images to be professionally archived or preserved for later sale ... only looking to add to my own digital galleries and make them available to friends and family. Sounds like the Epson V500 seems to be a pretty popular and a good place to start.

 

[manning]

The Canon 8800 will do it for you. If you look at the pictures you have I don't think you need something that needs to be super sharp.

If the other brands are around the same price, consider them too.

 

[Gianna'sPapa]

So you use a flatbed scanner for the slides?

Yes, it comes with trays for mounting the slides. It is a time consuming process.

 

[Groucho]

I use a Nikon Coolscan 4000. It's very nice but overkill for most people. (Especially since prices seem to still be going up for used ones.) I would recommend one of the Epsons with Digital ICE for most people. I would not recommend any of the cheap (<$500) dedicated negative/slide scanners.

If you want to get really in-depth, there's a program called VueScan which gives you more functionality than the bundled scanning software. There's also one called SilverFast but I prefer VueScan. (I have to use it to make the Coolscan work in Win7...)

I would say to try a few different settings and find what you like best, then when you go to do your scans, do them at the highest quality possible. Scanning is tedious so you will only want to do it once!

If you want some techy reading, Ctein over at The Online Photographer has written a few articles recently about film scanning; here is the most recent one.

 

[m-tinkerbelle]

hi!

I can't find a photo lab to scan my kodak 110 (format) photo negatives nor i have been able to find a negative scanner that works for that format. Do you know a cheap negative scanner that might work for those 110 pics?

Has anyone tried scanning negatives with a regular flat-bed scanner or taking a picture of each frame and manipulating in photoshop or Gimp?
I was experimenting with that and it sort of works for 110 pictures but I can't get a full color picture out of it. It works better for 35mm pics, but I have to try scanning them with my flatbed scanner (I have to reinstall windows for that first)

For what I know, for the scan to work the negative needs light from both sides, right? so I might not be able to get any decent result without a negative scanner... am I right or not? ;(

thanks in advance, any feedback will be greatly appreciated
most of my childhood pics were taken with a 110 kodak camera and photo labs don't make printings out of those anymore (where I live at least)

 

[Groucho]

hi!

I can't find a photo lab to scan my kodak 110 (format) photo negatives nor i have been able to find a negative scanner that works for that format. Do you know a cheap negative scanner that might work for those 110 pics?

Has anyone tried scanning negatives with a regular flat-bed scanner or taking a picture of each frame and manipulating in photoshop or Gimp?
I was experimenting with that and it sort of works for 110 pictures but I can't get a full color picture out of it. It works better for 35mm pics, but I have to try scanning them with my flatbed scanner (I have to reinstall windows for that first)

For what I know, for the scan to work the negative needs light from both sides, right? so I might not be able to get any decent result without a negative scanner... am I right or not? ;(

thanks in advance, any feedback will be greatly appreciated
most of my childhood pics were taken with a 110 kodak camera and photo labs don't make printings out of those anymore (where I live at least)

Your best bet is probably a flatbed scanner that is optimized for scanning negatives (the presence of "digital ICE" is usually a good indication.) The Epsons mentioned in this thread are a good choice. They have backlighting in the lid so there's no problem with 110 film.

If you have prints, you may find that you get better results just scanning the print, since the negative may show more grain. I haven't tried back-to-back comparisons, though, so take that with a grain of salt.

I have scanned a couple 110s with my Coolscan 4000, which is a dedicated negative scanner. I sandwich the negatives where a normal 35mm negative would go. It's a little sloppy and tedious but does work. Someone does make 110 holders for it but they're silly expensive.

Here's an example. You can see that it's fairly grainy; some of that could be cleaned up after the fact.

 

[m-tinkerbelle]

thank you for your reply Groucho!
no, I don't have printed copies of those photos. If I can't get to scan the negatives they'll be forever lost I'll see if I can find that Epson scanner and I'll make sure I try your "sandwich" technique
I would be happy to get those pictures back, even if they're grainy
Many of them are pictures from my first trip to WDW so they're quite special to me

thanks for posting your sample picture