OT: film scanner

[Bill Wright]

Does anyone have any practical experience of film scanners? I need to make files from 35mm colour slides.

Bill

[Alan]

Yes. Dead easy, better quality than flat scanners.

[Tim Watts]

You really need one with an IR channel - I've used one 15 years ago (Nikon) and they work really well. The IR channel takes an image of the film substrate's imperfections (scratches, staining, dust) and the software can then mask much of the imperfections out.

[Woody]

You can get quite reasonable slide/35mm film scanners at reasonable prices but be aware that most of them are only 5Mp or thereabouts so will not show the result from the relatively high resolution of a 35mm slide. I paid about ?65 for mine.

If you have a lot of slides to do with pictures that really matter I would suggest looking on eBay for one of the Plustek range. They are not cheap - you could pay up to ?150 or more for one of the better models - but they do work albeit they can be a bit fiddley to set up properly. Like everyone the seller will have bought one to scan his/her slides and having done that have no further use for it hence the quantity for sale.

If you really want to push the boat out look at one of the Nikon or Canon dedicated scanners - it will cost you an arm and a leg but you will not beat the quality. BEWARE however that many of these types have a SCSI interface (for speed in the old days) which your PC will not inherently support and for which you may not be able to get an interface card.

Note: you will almost certainly need some software to adjust the final result - life is never as easy as just scanning! Corel PaintShopPro or Photoshop Elements will do the job for you, but for minor adjustments Adobe Lightroom is probably one of the best. The secret is to get a copy of V5.7.1 quite cheaply, then if you ever need to upgrade it to V6 to allow you to use other packages with it you can just buy the upgrade. Works out cheaper overall. Another to look at is Serif who have been making high quality and very easy to use software for years. They have recently brought out their Affinity range and for less tha ?50 it will probably be a steal - although I admit that as yet I haven't tried it. Their support though is brilliant.

[Charlie+]

On Tue, 2 May 2017 04:23:36 +0100, Bill Wright wrote as underneath :

Yes, el cheapos available Amazon etc, £40-ish work on scanning a projected image, work reasonably well if you need 'snap' quality. If you need real maximal detail out of 35mm slides you need 'Optical' (as opposed to the often advertised interpolated) scan of slides @ more than 4,500 dpi some do 8000 and more - this form of direct scanner is much more expensive due to the precision optics also the (gamma) spread in slides is very large so the scanner is more difficult to design. You cannot reproduce all the colour and greyscale depth of say a projected Kodachrome slide on a piece of paper! Be very careful of overblown dpi advertising! C+

[Martin Brown]

How many of them and in what condition?

Also for modest numbers of slides if you have a digital camera you could also consider using a small light box and camera in macro mode or a slide copier attachment for a DSLR. I have used both when I couldn't be bothered setting up the main scanner for a one off slide copy. A few flatbed scanners can do a rough and ready slide scan at >4000dpi too.

Unless his kit was very good and with slow emulsions it is unlikely that there is much real image detail beyond the 6 Mpixel mark or so. Kodachrome 25 requires more but 200ASA Ektachrome doesn't (unless you really want to capture the grain structure in great detail).

I have a venerable Nikon Coolscan III on SCSI. It's optics have clouded a bit over the years but it owes me nothing. The IR scratch channel is useful for digitising old material that has had a rough life.

For simple tweaks the free IrfanView will probably do.

[Alan White]

A Canon CanoScan 9000F Mark II.

I've scanned over 3000 35mm slides with mine and when it's up to speed can manage 40 slides/hour.

[NY]

I have used a Minolta slide scanner and got some good results from it, both using the Minolta software and generic software such as VueScan. I'm glad it's slides and not negatives that you want to scan, because I've never managed to get good results from negs.

Dirt can be a problem, as can fading of the emulsion of some slides. An IR channel helps with removing dirt, but I think it's Kodachrome that it doesn't work with because the emulsion is opaque to IR so there's no difference between good film and dirt for the noise-removal software to use.

Some scanners make multiple scans of the film to remove the amount of digital noise in the darker parts when slides are dark (underexposed) but this increases the scanning time *considerably*.

It's probably worth going for a scanner that can take several (eg 4) slides in a strip, so you can perform a quick low-resolution scan of four slides at once, adjust exposure and focus for each one and then set it going to scan all four slides in greater detail while you have a cup of tea. Easier than doing this process individually on each slide every time.

Be prepared to experiment a bit with slides that are not correctly exposed or which are a funny colour (eg daylight film under tungsten of fluorescent light). Try to do as much of the exposure and colour correction in the scanner, because you'll get better results than trying to make big adjustments in software such as Paint Shop Pro afterwards.

One final tip: film scanners work by advancing the slide gradually past a strip sensor, using a stepper motor to move the slide. When this is running, especially with multi-sample scanning to remove digital noise, the scanner can make a loud moaning, so stand it on something that will deaden the noise a bit and not amplify it.

[newshound]

See two very recent threads in rec.photo.digital, one started by myself and a followup started by Tony Cooper

[John Rumm]

Yup, done it a few ways...

How many do you need to process, since that will have an impact on the options?

Options include dedicated slide/film scanner (with optional auto feeder)

Flatbed scanner with transparency hood

Re-photographing the slides on a lightbox with extension tubes / macro lens

Each have pros and cons.

[Pinnerite]

I bought a Plustek OpticFilm8100 Film Scanner just under two years ago for £190. I processed 10,386 slides including a few negatives, mostly at 2400 dpi overvthe next 14 months an then sold it for £95.

The packaged (Windows) software was excellent, with both positives and negatives. My advice though, is to put every option through its paces because the image correction facilities are pretty extensive.

HTH, Alan

[David Wade]

Unless the slides are in pristine condition be prepared to spend some time tweaking the results. I have tired several inexpensive types, the Maplin one which is available works ok, but does show any bits or colour shading on the slides..

Dave

[dennis]

I have scanned about 35000 negatives using an HP flat bed with an A4 lightsource. You get good results at about 2400 DPI IME.

There are better ones about these days that will do a 35 mm frame in a second at about that resolution but you need to check the optical quality.

You can use a good camera with a close up lens or macro lens or extension tubes if you have them.

[therustyone]

I've just been playing about with that since my old Minolta dualscan, circa 1999, is showing its age so I started learning from various photo blogs. For simplicity use an old laptop showing a blank PowerPoint page for illumi nation and I used a Canon FD 50mm F3.5 macro film lens set around F8 with a spacer fitting a full frame Canon DSLR. Images recorded initially as RAW. Space the slide off the laptop screen or the pixels will show through. This gets everything off the slides and into digits that is visible with a

20x loupe though dust is a problem. Modern AF macro lenses fetch a high price though a standard 50mm prime lens is almost as good for this application.

[Vir Campestris]

All 35mm?

I borrowed a decent quality Canon one - and then found that my 126 slides wouldn't scan. They are square, and the slide scanner would only scan the rectangle of a 35mm one.

OTOH I've had perfectly adequate results from an Epson Perfection 1670 flatbed off Freegle. It has a light in the lid, so it can backlight the slides.

Beware of image processing SW. I went off one when I realised it had deleted all the funny little white dots off the shots of the fells in the Lake District.

The sheep.

That of course should be where the IR channel helps.

Andy

[Andrew]

+1

I have a Nikon Coolscan 9000 that I bought in 2008 when I stopped work and had some money left in then company account. managed to get it as a company purchase and VAT back.

Good ones now sell on ebay for more than I paid for it and it has only had light, occasional home use. I picked up a few boxes of old slide films in a car boot sale, taken in Africa in the 40's or 50's and the special adaptor with anti-newton glass plates is perfect for holding them flat and the nikon software, while not a patch on Silverfast does a briliant job at restoring the colours.

You can easily spent ages tweaking every slide so I wish I had bought the Coolscan 5000 with a magazine for bulk scanning, and it came with a USB 2.0 interface, not the Firewire that the

9000 supercoolscan has.

The camera shop in a nearby town has a professional job that can scan hundreds in one go which for most people is a more sensible option.

Andrew

[RobertL]

I have a Nikon coolscan V. it works fine but the software is not very good. I use third party software which is much better:

I scanned 3000 Kodachrome slides with it. The files (raw) are, IIRC about 150Mbyte.

I didn't have an autofeeder and I fed them in one at a time. This was pretty mind destroying and I found it best to do this in parallel with some other activity.

Robert