The better negative and slide scanners please

[leon]

Hi Guys, just wondering, about film and negative scanners.
I have looked at heaps on the net and they all say that there's are the best, so now I'm more confused. :shrug:
Can anyone suggest a moderately priced unit suited just for negatives and slides please.

Many thanks.

Leon:thumbsup:

[Wavytone]

A few years ago I used a Microtek SM i800 flatbed to do “The Final Scan” of 5000 slides from my father, this worked well.

It had frames to hold several strips of film or batches of 12 x 35mm slides, scanned as a batch.

Also did negatives either individually or in film strips.

No issues, the resolution was fine and the resulting quality very nice though some editing afterwards was necessary one-by-one to clean them up and do the usual adjustments (levelling, fix exposure or white balance).

Best part was that despite being an expensive one - not a cheapie from Officeworks - this unit was highly sought after by the desktop publishing brigade, once the job was done I resold it for more than I paid.

[bojan]

I have one (Plustek), it is good, but slow...

So I made a negative/slide holder, attached it to DSLR...
This method was much faster, but it is not easy to convert it to positive and have a colour balace right.

Another one was Canon scanner, with slide/film adapter, I bought it on ebay.. it was good because it scanned negatives in cut-off batches (5).

[OzEclipse]

Search google for
copying film with digital camera
copying slides with digital camera
etc

And you'll see many articles about using your dslr and a macro lens to make slide copies as Bojan suggested. For copying slides it's pretty good. As Bojan pointed out negs are more difficult. If you can get hold of a negative of a grey card or an colour standard negative or shoot one yourself, you should be able to find the colour balance a bit more easily.

A modern DSLR with 14eV dynamic range has a bigger dynamic range than a Dmax 4.0 scanner. And with one shot instantaneous capture it's much faster than three pass scanning.

If you really want a scanner, the EPSON Perfection V800 is very good.
https://www.epson.com.au/products/scanner/perfectionv800photo.asp

The Plustek's are a decent scanner and a bit cheaper if your looking for value for money, the Epson is a better product though more expensive.

The Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN 4000 ED (LS-4000 ED) was the best consumer scanner I've used, but they are discontinued. If you get one second hand, you need to buy 3rd party software like VUESCAN software or Silverfast to run it. When they discontinued, Nikon stopped updating the drivers as operating systems changed.

Joe

[Russj]

I used a flatbed for a short while then I bought a Canon dedicated slide and neg scanner while it worked well it was very slow and pain in the butt to use, I ended up with a Wolverine F2D Mighty which I bought online from the US, it's just a digital camera in a different housing its fast and does a great job I've scanned around 2500 slide and negs with it, I can highly reccommend one. Russ

[leon]

Excellent, thank you very much for your suggestions.

Leon

[PhilTas]

I second Joe about the Coolscan 4000ED with Vuescan software. I have these and they give excellent results.

The 4000ED has an extra channel which does an IR scan of the film surfaces, and uses this information to eliminate or reduce scratches and marks on the film.
Without this feature, espcially if the slide/negative is old and has been viewed through projectors, you will spend considerable time in Photoshop etc to manually edit these blemishes out.
The downside is large file sizes. But if your slides are valuable and printable then I consider large file size as secondary to saving your films to a digital record.
The Vuescan software also does a pretty good job at correcting colour casts in old slides.
cheers Phil

[sil]

Plustek Opticfilm is what I went with. Fantastic results, dry scanner, not wet (which gets best results possible). Essential grab VueScan software, it IS the best scanning software, easy to use and works with every scanner. Also grab a IT8 scanner targets (http://www.targets.coloraid.de/) to suit the formats you intend to scan.

Digital ICE (IR channel) features are ok but can add smearing artifacts I've found, healing brush in photoshop is much better but I am trying to scan for archival rather than Facebook so putting in the time and effort to get a good scan is fine by me. Depend on what you want. Also I'd grab a bottle of film/negative cleaner too, it'll help get rid of dust and some mould on old film strips. If the film is old and valuable to you I'd also consider buying new sleeves to rehouse them in too, the old sleeves will have grit, mould spores and bacteria from years of storage. May as well rehouse in newer clean archival quality sleeves for storage after scanning. High dpi if fine but often the grain size in the negatives is the limiting factor.

Scan using vuescan with your calibration settings applied and NO balancing settings or auto adjustments (turn them all off! you ruin the point of a calibrated scan). adjust later in photoshop. You may want to experiment with any print scans the descreen settings which can do a good job of removing regular dots in the texture of some photo prints but the negs or slides should be good. I also transfer the metadata that I can to the raw scan sets I make, so one negative strip or strips from the one roll I store in one folder along with any information that was in the edges of the negative or written with them. Since this information is constant to the roll usually I note it in a text file with the raw scans so when I later process out jpegs I know I can use the same process or make an action to do them all. Also helps with other rolls of the same film. I record my raw scans as I call them though they are usually 48bit TIFF files, these are raw because they are the unprocessed scans, no cropping, no adjustments, nothing but the initial scan image at the highest resolution suitable to the source (take a few test scans first at the different dpi and look close to see where higher dpi becomes bigger blurs instead of finer details). I will use multipass scanning too at times (again test by scanning a small region of one photo containing good details).

[leon]

Thanks Sil, have to admit I am inclined to go in that direction, and have researched a few.
You said you went with one of these yourself, so which particular model was that please.

Thanks Leon

[sil]

honestly can't remember the model, looks like a black brick and you feed in through the side using their frame. the number 8000 comes to mind (it wasnt for price, it was under $1k but not sure, probably been ten years since i bought it.

Make sure it has the frames to suit your needs. Possible downside could be the frames dont pinch negatives so if they are curled the dont get flattened. But the lighting is flat so no gradients in the scan (I can say that on this forum and it'll be understood!). I've only used for negative 35mm film strips, pretty sure it'll do slides too but the slides I have should be covered by the negs already and its a long long term project to scan a shoebox crammed full of negs. I started with a microtek flatbed but that died and i got the plustek and redid the strips i'd already done to compare and preferred the plustek. The IT8 targets are great, scans come out looking the same as the source. its easy to leave an auto white balance setting on and ruin it, but for me I wanted to scans to be archival representations flaws and all, then process them digitally myself. Good luck, I dont know if mine has an auto feeder, I dont think so, but scans would take an hour each for the resolution depth and number of passes. Scan time will be universally long on any scanner, fast ones used to have scanline errors so I dont mind the wait for a good result. Hardest part has been trying to organise the scans later on.


Edit: its a OpticFilm 7500i AI that i have

[astro744]

I'm using Plustek 7200 with Silverfast Ai Studio Ver. 6.6. It is a very capable scanning solution for negative and positive transparency. You will need the IT8 calibration slide for the film that you have to ensure accurate colour representation. I have one for Ektachrome and one for Kodachrome. There is also a 35mm version of the 1951 USAF resolution target available to determine best scan resolution for your hardware.

I have nearly 3000 slides and have decided to scan each at 5400dpi giving me 100MB TIFF at 48-24bit colour. 48bit colour is available amongst other settings. At 5400 dpi each takes approx. 3 minutes to scan but considerably longer to tweak the settings such as exposure, balance, colour, curves and many others. Settings can be saved and recalled for the next slide if needed. I could not see a difference at 7200dpi and saved on scanning time and disk space by going 5400 and this will give large format prints at good resolution should I ever need it. I went 48-24 bit so I could open in Photoshop Elements but perhaps in hindsight should have just used 48bit Colour for archiving and edit further in Photoshop should I ever subscribe to it. I can always redo my first 1000 or so.

Multi-exposure to enhance dynamic range and scratch and dust removal is also standard with Ai Studio but these all add to the scanning time considerably. I am currently scanning some old slides for a school and they are averaging 20 minutes each to process.

Note whilst you can buy the scanner and software package here you will have to but any IT8 slides from Lasersoft and the currency will be in EUR not USD when you enter your destination as Australia as they ship out of Germany using DHL. Unfortunately shipping is 29EURO min. for a calibration slide so buy one for each type of film you have the most slides of to save on freight.

The current Plustek model to get is the 8200i which comes with Silverfast Ai Studio Ver.8 and it will set you back approx. $700 in AUS. This package also includes one calibration slide and it is likely Ektachrome and will get you going. If you have a lot of Kodachrome you will need a calibration slide for it and ensure you change your scan settings to Kodachrome otherwise you will get a blue cast.

You could easily spend $1000+ on hardware, software and calibration slides (100EUR each typically) and you have to ask yourself what do you want to do with the final scan. I think scanning is still available commercially but if you have a lot of slides and time on your hands then doing it yourself will save you in the long term and the results with the right hardware and software are very good.

See https://www.silverfast.com/

http://plustek.com/usa/

https://www.camera-warehouse.com.au/plustek-opticfilm-8200i-ai-film-scanner

https://www.digitalcamerawarehouse.com.au/plustek-opticfilm-8200i-ai-film-scanner

[leon]

Thank you once again many options open to me.

Leon

[Octane]

Another plus here for an Epson V800. I've got the Newton glass as well to help reduce moire. Haven't had a need to use it as of yet.


H