OT: (maybe) Photo Scanning with iPhone

[The Natural Philosopher]

well it does. I used to get blue shading to green on my old freebie LIDE

Distortion is not an issue, but gamma and color correction always are.

[The Natural Philosopher]

+1000

[The Natural Philosopher]

remember to do it at very high dpi.

[John Rumm]

Flat bed scanner is normally easier for photos, although camera based setups can be better for books / manuals etc.

For a phone based system you will need a desktop tripod and a suitable tripod mounting clip for the phone, so you can get it held in a decent stable position. Plus some decent softbox lighting. (you may find the combination costs more than a basic scanner though!).

Software, perhaps just something that will take a time-lapse style sequence, so you can just concentrate on swapping photos and let the phone worry about taking the pics (that also saves the problem of dislodging the position by touching the phone).

[John Rumm]

I would be surprised if the interface speed of USB2 (480 Mbps) was the limitation... (not suggesting that it was not slower - but just have my suspicions its not the USB bit causing the problem).

I use an old Epson 1680 Pro (with full A4 sized transparency hood). That has SCSI and USB (1) interfaces. On that you can see a slight reduction in speed on the 11 Mbps USB, but even then it not that dramatic.

While better optimised for things like video transfer, its worth noting that the original firewire spec is actually slightly slower than USB2 (400 Vs 480 Mbps)

[John Rumm]

Setting the camera to fixed exposure, and handling raw images normally gets round that.

[Martin Brown]

I'm pretty sure the mechanical scanner transport is the rate limiting step for high resolutions scanning and even on USB 2 it will not saturate the bandwidth (unless the driver has a fault - mine would sometimes never recover properly from PC sleeping).

For significant numbers of images I would also go for a flatbed scanner. My previous HP5300 was very good. Its newer replacement Canon Lide700 is superior in spec but has a pale blue border bias on one edge. Apart from that (correctable) defect it is OK.

The other way I deal with material which due to age, fragility and the inability to put it on a flatbed is photography with a DSLR lit by a north facing window. Photo albums require this sort of handling.

Some early 6x4 postcards were contact prints from original negative plates and will stand a lot of enlargement if scanned carefully.

[Chris Green]

The 'bees knees' for slide, negative and positive scanning is an Epson V800 or V850. Back when I was looking at scanning my 35mm slides and

120 negatives I bought an Epson V700 which is the predecessor of the V800 (looking at comparisons the V800 isn't a *big* improvement).

Also back when I was looking there was a lot of discussion about dedicated slide scanners such as the (now discontinued) Nikon ones which cost a lot more than the Epson V700. The general conclusion was that if you had *only* 35mm slides and they were really good quality ones then the Nikon might get a bit more out of them but for just about everything else the V700 was pretty good.

The V700 and V800 come with a slide holding frame that allow you to scan 12 slides at a time, though it takes about 30 minutes to scan 12 slides at 3200dpi so have a good book to read while it does it! :-)