Can you recommend a decent dedicated neg/film scanner?

[Jon Fitness]

Hi Folks. I've seen a lot of very nice scanned pictures posted up in various threads on here and I'd like to join in!

I've got a lot of prints but way back in the day I must have opted for a certain type of print process as the paper is not true gloss. This makes the scans come out a little rough so I'm thinking of digging out the negatives and scanning some of those. I also took rather a lot of black and white pics which I've never printed. So....

can anyone recommend a reasonable quality negative scanner that can cope with colour and B&W? There seems to be a lot of them around with a vast range of prices/capabilities/qualities  but I'm not sure where to start.

 I do have a few slides but most of them are beyond scanning due to my bad storage. Fortunately the negs have been stored under better conditions and seem to be fine.

Thanks

Jon F.

[corax67]

Don't know what your budget is Jon but I have a Nikon Coolscan 8000 ED - this came to me via my brother-in-law via his local camera shop going bust.

 

 

http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/scanner/scoolscan_8000_ed/

 

 

It's not the newest/most cutting edge bit of kit but it is awesome being able to handle lab slides, 16mm, 35mm & medium format media.

 

I ran the files through Photoshop CS5 (wife is a teacher so massively discounted) to clean up & repair where necessary and the results are spot on. I have seen them on rare occasions on eBay for around £150-200, about a tenth of the price of when they were new.

[Jon Fitness]

Don't know what your budget is Jon but I have a Nikon Coolscan 8000 ED - this came to me via my brother-in-law via his local camera shop going bust.

 

 

http://imaging.nikon.com/lineup/scanner/scoolscan_8000_ed/

 

 

It's not the newest/most cutting edge bit of kit but it is awesome being able to handle lab slides, 16mm, 35mm & medium format media.

 

I ran the files through Photoshop CS5 (wife is a teacher so massively discounted) to clean up & repair where necessary and the results are spot on. I have seen them on rare occasions on eBay for around £150-200, about a tenth of the price of when they were new.

I was thinking around that mark for the budget, so I'll keep an eye out on Ebay. I suspect it would be better to go for a second hand "name" product rather than an unknown.

Cheers

JF

[Danemouth]

Jon,

 

I also have Coolscan  - IIRC Nikon no longer make film scanners.

 

However whatever scanner you do buy I would recommend the software from http://www.hamrick.com/ rather than that supplied with the scanner- the Nikon software produces less than optimal results. Vuescan works with almost any scanner - I even use it with my HP flatbed.

 

Regards,

 

Dave

[Froxfield2012]

I had a number of glass quarter plate negatives to scan so went for a flat bed scanner:  Epson V700 Photo to be precise.  It seems to cope OK with everything I've thrown at it so far.  I use Photoshop CS6 to tidy up the images.  In some cases this means "reconstruct".  I can only say it is surprising just how damaged an image can actually be recovered.

[ZiderHead]

Another vote for VueScan here, cross platform and works with some really obscure kit (even my recently retired 20yr old Linotype Jade!)

 

 

* Edit: The licencing is uncommonly sensible too - I have an XP and Win7 machine at work and a Win7 and OSX at home all on the same licence, same interface, same software

[jonny777]

A third vote for Vuescan, it works far better with my Minolta Elite 5400 than the Minolta software it came with.

 

I don't think that model is produced any more. There was a big drop in film scanner sales once digital cameras took off, and they are hard to find these days.

[martin_wynne]

I also took rather a lot of black and white pics which I've never printed. So.... can anyone recommend a reasonable quality negative scanner that can cope with colour and B&W?

 

Hi Jon,

 

Not a proper answer, but Maplin currently have a USB film scanner for £10

 

 http://www.maplin.co.uk/p/maplin-5mp-pc-compact-film-and-slide-scanner-a79lh

 

I also have lots of never-printed B&W negs, so thought it worth a try. It does B&W and colour, and is ideal if you just want to see what you have. For the low price the quality is surprisingly good. Here are a couple of mine at random from 1985 just scanned:

 

 

 

Martin.

[jonny777]

Wow. That is good.

 

Does it give a maximum resolution?

[martin_wynne]

Here's a colour neg at random from 1985:

 

 

Martin.

 

 

[asa]

I picked up a slide negative scanner from Lidl this week for £30.I haven't had time to try it out unfortunately,it will be next week before I get a chance now.

Hopefully I'll dig something out worth showing.

[beast66606]

Epson V700 too for me - it can batch scan which is useful when doing a lot.

[martin_wynne]

Wow. That is good. Does it give a maximum resolution?

 

Hi jonny,

 

Resolution is 1800dpi, the scanned image for 35mm film is 2592 x 1728 pixels. In these pics I have resized them to 800 wide for RMweb. Here's another:

 

 

For a £10 chance purchase in Maplin I'm very pleased with the results.

 

Martin.

[martin_wynne]

A couple more from this £10 film scanner. B&W negs from 1978-1980:

 

 

 

Martin.

[Jon Fitness]

A couple more from this £10 film scanner. B&W negs from 1978-1980:

 

shrewsbury_1978.jpg

 

craig_y_nos1980.jpg

 

Martin.

They look rather good Martin, was there any post scanning processing required?

Also a big thankyou to all who have replied. I've certainly got a few options now although the Maplins one is looking like a good starting point.

Cheers

JF

[martin_wynne]

They look rather good Martin, was there any post scanning processing required?

 

Hi Jon,

 

For the B&W negs I simply cropped and resized them for RMweb. The colour scans were a bit too blue (the scanner has to remove the orange cast), so I adjusted the colours in PaintShopPro (I could have used the bundled software instead).

 

The results will obviously depend on the quality of the originals, make of film, etc. There is a limit to what you can expect for the price. I think this is a clearance item in Maplin, so you may need to ring round the stores.

 

I haven't tried it yet with slides, I will do that later and post the results.

 

regards,

 

Martin.

[TheSignalEngineer]

A third vote for Vuescan, it works far better with my Minolta Elite 5400 than the Minolta software it came with.

 

I don't think that model is produced any more. There was a big drop in film scanner sales once digital cameras took off, and they are hard to find these days.

Minolta were good for film and slide but are no longer made and the software that came with my Dimage DS Dual 3 doesn't work with anything past XP. Vuescan works it well.

I also use a Canon flatbed with film and slide holders which can do tiff files up to 100MB, so very high resolution. I can get a decent picture from half of a 35mm slide, and have even used it to scan 110 negatives.

[MikeOxon]

The Maplin kit looks very good, especially at that price. I assume that it is effectively a small digital camera connected directly to the computer through the USB port.  A digital camera is usually much quicker than a scanner, since the latter only has a line of photo-sensors, which have to be moved mechanically across the image, whereas a camera has a rectangular grid of sensors to cover the whole image at once.

 

 

Any digital camera is good for copying slides.  Negs are a little more difficult because they have an orange coloured 'mask', which has to be removed by means of image editing software.  I describe a couple of 'home made' techniques that I have used to digitise hundreds of slides on my web-page at http://home.btconnect.com/mike.flemming/technic2.htm

 

Mike

[martin_wynne]

I haven't tried it yet with slides, I will do that later and post the results.

 

Some slides from 1986 (Fujichrome). Maplin £10 film scanner. No post-processing other than resizing for RMweb:

 

 

 

 

Martin.

 

 

[Froxfield2012]

Incidentally, I think the issue of resolution is much over emphasised.  Most publications work with 300 dpi and an image size of about 3000 pixels across.  With any film material a limit is reached because of the grain of the film (B&W and colour film).  Positive colour slides are usually dyes but (back in the day) tend to lack absolute quality of definition, although it varies by brand:  I always found Kodak products to be "sharper" than Agfa for example.  Pretty much all the shots on my web-site (see link below) were scanned at 300 dpi to a size of 6000 pixels largest dimension and then cut back to 3000 pixels for the web-site.  Those I have posted here have been down-sized even more to around 800 pixels.  For 35mm I have scanned at 600 dpi quite often (and larger very occasionally for a test) but I don't honestly see the difference in the end result. 

 

That at any rate is my experience!

 

Richard

[beast66606]

I've been trying various settings on the Epson V700 scanner, I have finalised on 4800dpi and TIFF format.

 

Here's one resized and saved as a jpg

 

 

and a detail cropped out - it's Flyingsignalmans car !

 

 

(Sealand box btw)

 

The reason I went for the Epson is the flexibility of various formats if I need it and more importantly, the ability to scan 4 strips of negatives in a single batch - I also bought a spare caddy for £10 so I can get the next batch ready when scanning.

 

Remember something I've learnt about scanning - what may seem like "enough" resolution now may not be the same next year when you need to look at detail, scan at the highest you sensibly can.

[jonny777]

Incidentally, I think the issue of resolution is much over emphasised.  Most publications work with 300 dpi and an image size of about 3000 pixels across.  With any film material a limit is reached because of the grain of the film (B&W and colour film). <snip>

 

That at any rate is my experience!

 

Richard

 

This maybe the case if all you are ever going to do is look at small images on the net, or in a magazine.

 

I had this argument many years ago and so, on my old Fotopic site I scanned a slide of Doncaster station twice. Once at a low resolution of 600 dpi, and one at my Minolta's maximum optical resolution of 5400 dpi. Even when scaled down to 1Mb they looked the same, but the difference came when I zoomed in on the number of the EMU standing in one of the bay platforms.

 

With the low resolution scan the number was completely unreadable, and the image pixellated well before it was expanded to the size necessary, but on the high resolution the number was perfectly visible. The difference being that the low resolution scan gave a file size of 3Mb but the high res was 105Mb.

 

Now you may say, what is the use of one image being a massive 105Mb? But, remember that sharp 35mm transparencies could be projected onto a  wall or screen measuring maybe 4ft x 3ft without losing definition. If you do not scan film at the highest possible resolution, this ability will be lost.

 

Slides will not last forever; the colours on my early ones (which are over 40 years old) are already looking a bit suspect, and they have been stored inside a slide-box in a dark, dry cupboard for most of their lives. Once the originals have deteriorated, there will be no way of replacing them - unless everyone scans them digitally at the highest possible resolution now and saves them on whichever media they prefer, (a series of memory sticks/cards is probably the most reliable, but I have a 3Tb hard drive which holds thousands of them, and dvd backup).

 

It would be a shame if, after decades of high quality film records of railways, our ancestors found that they could find nothing bigger than a 2Mb digital photo after the start of this millennium. 

[Quarryscapes]

I've used Plustek Optic Film scanners and Minolta ones, results were similar though scanning was a slow, painful business with very little proper control of colour balance etc. I now use a Slide copier attachment for my Sony A7R digital camera which is faster and offers a lot more resolution and post processing options than the scanners. 

[TheSignalEngineer]

I think that higher resolution comes into its own for crops or if you want to do a large size print for framing. It allows you to read things on good negatives which just look a blur on a lower resolution. I also save my scans as TIFF files as this doesn't lose so much in the way it processes the image as happens with a JPEG. I then resize and make a JPEG if I want to post the picture on the web. 

 

The first of these was from a JPEG at 1200 dpi, the second a TIFF at 9600 dpi when I wanted to ID the vehicle number, both done on a Canon 9000F flatbed. These are before any post-scan manipulation.

 

 

[Froxfield2012]

Hmm.  Sorry to disagree but film grain still limits resolution.  And even my father's B&W lantern slides from quarter plate negatives were not that sharp when projected on a wall.  Sharp at viewing distance for sure but not up close:  limited by projector optics and screen texture.  Each to his own, but I prefer an image size I can manipulate easily.

 

Here is one of the 3000 pixel images reduced to 800 pixels and a crop increased in size to 800 pixels.  The original scan was at 300 dpi.  You can see the impact of the grain of the film.  The original medium was a two and a quarter square negative on Ilford FP3.  So much also depends upon the sharpness of the original.

 

Richard

 

 

 

Edited to remove an extra "also"