Photo negatives, slides copier recommendations?

[stuart noble]

I used Jessops to scan some old photos but the images were indistinguishable from those produced by an Epson I bought on EBay for a tenner

[LumpHammer]

I use an Epson Perfection V500 Photo to digitise 35mm slides. It's just an A4 flat-bed scanner with a bit of plastic to hold slides and negatives of various sizes. It probably doesn't extract as much information from the slides as a dedicated slide scanner, but the results are quite acceptable for sharing old slides with overseas relatives.

[Peter Johnson]

I have the Epson V750 which is only slightly different, it's several years since I researched them, and I have seen them in the offices of two book publishers. It can take account of the difference between mounted slides and negatives and items scanned against the glass. I've scanned lantern slides with it as well. Worth noting that the V750 was launched in 2007 and was only replaced by the V800 last year. (Don't what the difference is though.)

[Steve]

Thanks. I looked into this a while back and was told that a scanner couldn't make them positives; I'd need to have them developed first. Has the technology advanced, or did I misunderstand?

[charles]

I'm sure you can now get positives out of film negatives - not that I've yet tried. Once I become less active , I've a lot to go through

[cl]

It depends more on the scanner software than the hardware I'd guess. My V700 Epson does it automatically, or at least the software supplied with the scanner does it automatically. I.e. it recognises a colour negative film and converts it to a positive image that's pretty well colour balanced without any intervention from me. It also does a good job on restoring the colour balance of old and badly faded transparencies.

[cl]

The V750 is basically the same as the V700 I believe with better slide handling (I think).

[Chris French]

The scanner as such doesn't do the conversion, but software will.

I imagine software packaged with the scanner does it, and other photoediting software as well can.

[dennis]

I used a flat bed with a negative adapter and it could extract more information than the film could hold (in theory). It did 48 bit scanning at 2400 dpi (optical) but it didn't half take a while to scan 30 pictures (which is the maximum you could load at a time). It was a HP one but its in the attic now so I can't tell you the model number but it had an A4 light source in the lid. I expect the scanners based on 5 mega pixel camera chips that they sell in lidl/aldi will satisfy most people and take about a second to do a frame. An slr will do a good job too once you sort out the mounting for the light source and film.

[PeterC]

Yes, those reviews... Something on Amazon had several v. poor reviews, none for the product on the page!

[dennis]

Scanners will work with any developed film, positive or negative..

however slide film (positive) has a colourless backing so it shows the correct colours when viewed in normal light.

Negative film still has the colour filter layers in place (they are bleached out in slide film) which gives a strong orangeish look to the negatives. You can correct for this in software but you need a scanner with enough colour depth to allow full correction, one that only does (about) 8 bit colour depth will struggle as will making jpegs and then correcting them, some subjects will look ok some wont.

[John Rumm]

I have done a fair bit of this - but with kit that is now "old"... I actually found in spite of having a dedicated high end film scanner, I could get very decent results with a good flatbed with trannie hood (Epson Expression 1680 pro). It makes a very credible job of misc shaped negs and other transparancies.

For bulk slides, these days it probably better to take them for conversion to CD/DVD rathet than but a scanner unless you are doing lots of them.

[Bill]

It is my late fathers lifetime collection, starting from about 1935, some are on glass plates, the later are 35mm. Plus some other glass ones will be earlier they belong to my grandfather and date from goodness knows when. I hate to think of the quantity, but there are a lot!

The later ones come complete with prints, so I can see what they are easily, but a lot of the earlier ones are just the negatives. Much as I would love to let someone else convert them I think the cost would be rather high, plus, not having started to do it yet, I think that it may be quite enjoyable. Thoughts may change over time of course :-)

[Johny B Good]

AFAIR, that 'strong orangeish' cast is called the 'mask layer' (or requires a masking filter to deal with it when printing - it _has_ been quite a long time since I last studied photochemistry and processing as a hobby interest where I never went as far as attempting colour printing from home processed colour negative film although I did process a roll of FP4 to create monochrome slides by way of an experiment).

My previous attempts with a cheapish Aldi document/film scanner produced rather abysmal results with colour negatives so I guess it fell far short of requirements and foul of that mask layer (I'd hoped I could do a better job than Max Spielmans had done with the photo cd images taken off 4 rolls of colour negative film one of which I'd tried to scan.

Closer inspection with good illumination and a jeweler's loupe revealed they'd actually extracted about as much as was possible from the cheapish 35mm film stock I'd used. Much to my chagrin, it turned out that a mere 3Mpxel P&S digital camera could do a slightly better job than my film SLR (at least when comparing the results with the cheapish film stock I'd used - it might have been different story if I had decide to blow a lot more cash on 'superior' film stock).

[Bob Eager]

Haha! Yes, I did a load of monochrome slide production while I was at school. It gt me out of doing some pretty pointless post O-level chemistry...

[Syd Rumpo]

I tried a negative/slide scanner, but found that scanning colour prints gave much better results - both the resolution and the colours looked better. Of course, that's no good if you don't have prints.

Cheers

[cl]

A mix quite like my collection started back in the 1960s with a 116 folding camera, then a 12 on 120 camera, then a 16 on 120 and finally a series of 35mm SLRs. I also had a few glass plates.

I scanned all of these (something like 15000 pictures in all) uisng my Epson V700 scanner, it takes time but the V700 does a pretty good job of managing the gross imperfections so I just left it on its default settings most of the time. I just did a bit of manual tuning on some especially important images. The V700 will scan (if I remember right)

12 35mm slides at a time, it takes several minutes but at least you can do something else while it thinks.

It is quite enjoyable but you need to allow lots of time, I found it quite interesting remembering where and when I had taken the pictures, getting exact (or approximate) dates, etc.

[cl]

It certainly should be better scanning the negatives directly, prints don't give anywhere near the full resolution possible from a good negative (unless of course they're big prints, like 10" x 8").

It does of course depend on the scanner, if it hasn't got the resolution to exploit the negative resolution fully then it might produce better results from the print which is significantly larger then the negative of course.

[Syd Rumpo]

Yes, that's what I thought when I bought the neg/slide scanner.

But it was a cheap neg/slide scanner, and my 'all-in-one' printer/scanner is much better on the prints.

So a more expensive neg/slide scanner may well be better than a cheap document scanner.

Cheers

[Vir Campestris]

I think you were told a load of rubbish.

My flatbed (Epson) has an adapter for slides and negs, and SW that does the conversion.

Andy