Scanning 35mm Slides and Color Negatives

[umfundi]

Does anyone have recent experience with scanning color slides and negatives?

Does a regular flatbed like the CanoScan 9000 work OK, or should I use a special scanner? Has anyone used a service that does this? I have about 10,000 slides that I have decided to digitize.

Thank you,

Keith

[Sunny Sarkar]

I'd also be interested in a recommendation for a good site/service for digitizing slides and negatives. I don't want to invest in new hardware since I do not shoot film anymore.

[nisiprius]

Two bad experiences. I don't have an answer, but I do know two things that didn't work for me. a) A flatbed scanner with transparency capability. b) An el-cheapo slide and negative scanner.

The flatbed scanner was a fairly pricey Epson Perfection Photo 3200, that claimed to be able to scan 35 mm slides and negatives at up to 9600 dpi. What I found was that loading the carrier was a slow and fussy process; that scanning at even 4800 dpi took a really long time--like minutes; that the results were sharp (you could see the actual film grain) but that there were constant difficulties with getting the frames aligned (thin black stripes along two edges of the final image; and that slides weren't too bad but that Epson's provided software didn't really know how to get good color from negatives. I pretty much quit using it--too much of a hassle.

Fast forward to a couple of years ago. I saw a 35-mm slide and negative digitizer in Brookstone for about $125, and said, "Don't be such a fussbudget, you don't really need high quality, just buy something and get it done. Brookstone may not be the highest-end stuff but I should be able to trust it to be basically usable." What I found was that speed was OK, alignment was not bad, the resolution was good enough for what I wanted--but that the grey-scale and color rendition was bad beyond belief. Black-and-white negatives were awful. Color negatives, vomitrocious. In brief, I was getting better results scanning 4x6" color prints on my flatbed scanner than I was getting from scanning the negatives in this thing.

[stevep001]

Here's what I'm planning to do when I get around to scanning my slide collection.

Buy a used Nikon slide/film scanner on eBay -- prices range from $1000 to 3000. Scan my slides. Sell the scanner to the next person.

[shawcroft]

Boy, is this a timely discussion.
I asked some colleagues about this very subject about 4 months ago. They had some recommendations...about hardware (mostly for Apple operating systems/computers) as well as slide scanning services.
Let me see if I can reconstruct what they suggested,
Shawcroft

[CaliJim]

10,000. OMG. I can't image scanning all of them unless it is part of some scientific or art collection. If they are family photographs - probably a lot of them are not worth the effort of digitizing.

A few years ago I inherited a ton of my dad's slides. I sorted them on a light table and only scanned the best ones. I made a 1 hour DVD slide show set to music. Sent it to the relatives. Everybody took a tearful trip down memory lane. Goal achieved. The rest of the slides I put in archival sleeves. I decided I wasn't going to toss the slides just yet.

What I did was I rented the top of the line Nikon slide scanner with the auto feeder from a local pro camera shop. This was a few years ago. Don't ask me what I paid to use the gear - I don't remember. I was able to scan about 300 slides in day. The auto feed capacity was limited and sometimes jammed. It took a lot of baby sitting.

[climber2020]

Does anyone have recent experience with scanning color slides and negatives?

Does a regular flatbed like the CanoScan 9000 work OK, or should I use a special scanner? Has anyone used a service that does this? I have about 10,000 slides that I have decided to digitize.

Thank you,

Keith

I use an Epson V500 to scan my slides and negatives. It comes with carriers that will accommodate both 135 and medium format film. I've been using it for 2 years now and have been happy with the results.

[umfundi]

Thank you all, so far. A number of things I have not thought of.

Please, keep it coming! Some thoughts:

1. Go high end. Rent (or buy and resell) a professional machine.

2. Sort and select before scanning. (We have a light table somewhere among all our stuff.)

3. Check with the pros. We have a couple of good independent camera stores, one three miles and one ten miles away.

Nisiprius, yes. I have heard that getting the correct color from negatives is a problem. Mostly, I have classic Kodachrome 25 slides, with about 25% higher speed Ektachrome. I am looking forward to being able to correct the exposure on many of them.

About 1,000 of the slides are my Dad's. What prompted me to go down this path was discovering that a bulb for his old slide projector is now $100.

My hobby is genealogy. I am reminded of the genealogist who said: Make careful instructions for what is to become of your research. How it should be sorted, published, given to relatives, donated to libraries. Then, do it yourself. No one else will.

Keith

[clearwater]

Does a regular flatbed like the CanoScan 9000 work OK, or should I use a special scanner? Has anyone used a service that does this? I have about 10,000 slides that I have decided to digitize.

I'm a professional photographer so can save you a lot of time, since I hear this question almost daily.

10,000 slides? No. You will not live long enough. I am not kidding. The equipment and time to process is too slow. You need to edit. A realistic goal is maybe 100 slides a week. You will think you can do more, but it will not happen. So if you keep that kind of pace up without fail, in a good year you may get through about 5000. No one does this as it is too labor intensive. My recommendation is you edit to the best 500, and make that your goal. Put the other 9,500 in PrintFile archival slide pages and wait for the technology to improve.

For what its worth, I have a backlog of about 50,000 slides. Guess how many I plan to scan this year? About 500. And only at that since I know those are profitable images which sell on a regular basis. The simple fact is the equipment to handle this frankly stinks. To give you an idea of how much time it takes for a professional image -- scan: 15 minutes/slide (Imacon), color correction/spotting/prepress: 30 minutes/slide, filing/database: 15 minutes. Total about an hour per image. So 500 images for me is about three months worth of full time work. Crazy.

Ok. So, what to use to tackle this job. My recommendation for all but professional publication is the Epson V500:

http://www.amazon.com/Epson-B11B189011- ... B000VG4AY0

It uses a dust removal technology called Digital ICE to remove automatically the majority of dust and scratches. This will save you hours and hours of time -- do not even bother with any device without this built-in. The Epson V500 is about $150. The price can't be beat.

By way of background, just if you're interested: In the "pro" world, we use dedicated film scanners like the Nikon 4000/5000/9000. These units are no longer manufactured. Even used they command very high prices. Over time, the internal mirror accumulates dust, and the equipment need to be disassembled and cleaned. This is not officially approved by Nikon and people have rendered units useless by bad cleaning. I do not believe Nikon supports these units in any way at this point. Suffice to say, for those of us using these for "batch scanning" it is like living on the edge. To top it off, the Nikon software is no longer supported. In all, one big pain. At the even "higher" end, we use Imacon units. These are many many thousands of dollars and are far too slow for consumer use. At the "highest" end, we use drum scanners ... they are at pro labs and take a real experienced operator to run well.

If you want to outsource these jobs, I wish there was better news. The only place I know of who is using Nikon 5000s to do batch scanning is Pixmonix in Portland, OR:

http://www.pixmonix.com

Expect to pay about $1/slide for services like this. The good news is you send them a box, and the work is done for you. You get your stuff back in the mail, put the DVD in your PC, and you're done. If you have 10,000 slides, you need to be very wealthy to consider this type of service.

Whether you send the work out, or do it yourself, you will find quickly that the labor involved is indeed about $1 per image.

My recommendation is an Epson V500, editing, and 500 scans. Then over time you may want to scan more.

You need to have realistic expectations on the time involved. My hope is one day someone will come up with a very high speed device that can process at least 100 slides per hour. At that point many people will be able to digitize complete archives. There is no "pro" solution that is particularly faster. We are all stuck with the same problem.

[JMacDonald]

Thanks for the information. I will give the Epson V500 a try. It would be nice to save some of my slides.

[whomever]

Costco advertises 29 cents per slide. A relative just had that done with several hundred family photo slides (either Costco or Walmart, can't remember) and they turned out fine. Mind you, we're talking the usual family snapshots, not Ansel Adams quality. The service might be OK for fancier stuff; I'm just not discriminating enough to be able to tell one way or another .

I've done onsey/twoseys with an attachment for a flatbed; as others have said, that's going to be ugly for more than a very few. A couple of minutes per slide at least.

[grayfox]

100 per week? How about 100 per hour?

I can digitize five 20-slide Printfile pages of slides in the time it takes to play one side of an LP record, for pennies per slide. Not counting post processing with LR which probably add another 1/2 hour.

Here is a shot from 6th Street in Austin, Texas, Sept-1992. Shot on Fujichrome 100 with Pentax K1000.

[rob]

Some random thoughts from someone that uses a Nikon film scanner (5K) a lot.... and have scanned a few thousand slides and negs....

* It's a PITA and you might want to look at offshore scanning shops (e.g. scancafe).
* It will take double the time you expect.
* Flat bed scanners are faster & ok but not the quality of the film scanner.
* Some people get great results from a macro lens (say 100mm on a fullframe) and a rig to put the slide on the end (see ebay) - similar to the old individual slide viewers,
* Clean the media before you put it in
* ICE does not usualy work well with kodachrome slides, so keep that in mind
* Black & White is far harder and will have more scratches.
* The Nikon drivers are not supported and only 32bit BUT if you buy vuescan it has 64bit drivers that run the scanner fine.

Good luck!

[Watty]

Costco advertises 29 cents per slide. A relative just had that done with several hundred family photo slides (either Costco or Walmart, can't remember) and they turned out fine. Mind you, we're talking the usual family snapshots, not Ansel Adams quality. The service might be OK for fancier stuff; I'm just not discriminating enough to be able to tell one way or another .

I've done onsey/twoseys with an attachment for a flatbed; as others have said, that's going to be ugly for more than a very few. A couple of minutes per slide at least.

+1 on Costco for family slides.

I did sort through the slides and only had the most interesting third scanned. A lot of them were pictures of places and multiple pictures of the same event so I only selected the best third. Even the scans of the Kodachromes were fine for family pictures.

I did have the scanned in about four batches just in case they got lost or damaged but I did not have any problems. This was a few years ago and they did the scanning in the store so there was less chance of the slides being lost in shipping.

Using some place like Costco or doing it yourself does not need to be an "either/or" choice. You can have them scanned by some place like Costco and then you can select the small percentage that might benefit by scanning them yourself and rescan them.

A fair number of the slide had some fading issues so I did tweak these in Photoshop elements and that was easy and pretty quick.

I did try scanning a few on a flatbed scanner and one of the things that I found was that in addition to taking a long time, it was also very loud. I was planning on scanning slides while I watched TV but the scanner was too loud for that to really work.

[midareff]

I inherited about 650 slides and mixed color and b/w photos from my mother. Some from as far back (best guess) as 1890's of her parents in their younger years before immigration from the Russia/Poland area. Digitized everything by buying a relatively inexpensive color stand alone scanner (I think it was a HP product) and going through a couple of dozen at a time. The biggest problem was identifying everything and many photos had to be emailed to older cousins for a "Do you know who this is?" No issues with color or quality ... the scanner broke a few years later and it went down the trash chute having earned its keep.

When I got it all finished + a family tree I made CDs for all the cousins that helped.

[obgraham]

I agree with Clearwater, but not fully.

I use the Epson V500, found it to be an excellent scanner for slides, negs, prints. I'm on my second one, the first cra***ed out at 7000 scans.
I in fact am just coming up on 10,000 scans -- 2/3 slides, others prints and negs.
It is indeed a tedious task, but one which I enjoy -- I've worked on it for over 2 years, at my own pace.

The scanner handles 4 at a time. You have to clean them, load them, preview, and make any adjustments to color, brightness, contrast individually. This is the part that cannot be sent out to a scanning service, or done by a high volume scanner. Then you hit scan, and typically it is 3-4 minutes to scan the 4 slides. Do something else, or get the next bunch ready. I scan to j-pegs, with only a small amount of compression, and a typical slide file is about 3 meg in size. I decided against scanning everything to TIFF, though for some old valuable family pictures that's what I have used.

If I want to do more work, like straightening, clear marks, cracks, etc on old prints, I use Photoshop Elements.

For me, the results are close enough to my more recent digital pictures. And the process lets me revisit the travels and family stuff on those pictures.

Waste of time?? -- You decide.

[jane1]

A couple of years ago, I used an Epson V500 to scan all my slides and negatives (1000s of them). I tried another scanner unsuccessfully but after reading a lot of reviews went with the V500. It is a slow process, but I am glad it is done. The results are decent. Read the reviews on amazon and decide if you are upto the process. I didn't want to lose any "memories" so ended up scanning most, even though not all photos were great.

[clearwater]

A followup to my earlier note. Costco / Walgreens / Walmart and the like typically use a Fuji Frontier for scanning. The results can be quite good, as long as you get an operator who knows the software and manages it correctly during the run. A typical complaint with Frontier scans is blown out highlights, for example. Generally these scans will be delivered as JPEGs. Which means if the scan was not spot on, it will be much more work, or maybe impossible, to generate a nice final image later.

[I'm starting to stray into detail here, the short version if you want to stop reading is "buy the Epson" and use the software in the box which makes all this pretty easy.]

In general, when scanning its better to ask for images to be delivered as TIFF images, which are uncompressed and can later be worked on in an image program (Photoshop, etc) with no quality loss. One reason the Frontier scans are so cost effective -- it's a fully automated process and you have to hope the machine guesses correctly during the scan process on levels etc. If so, and you can get TIFF output, it can be a very useful tool... especially at the price. When in doubt, try 20 or so slides and see if you like the quality.

The only reason I didn't mention this earlier is ideally you want to get the best scan you can the first time -- you don't want to go back and rescan something as the labor is too tedious. A scanner in your house lets you do what you want, when you want, and will consistently deliver good results. Generally the Epson software is very good. If you want more control, you can download and pay a very fair price for Ed Hamrick's Vuescan (works on both PC and Macs) which will give you additional functionality (at the expense of complexity).

I have heard stories from people who have run jobs at Costco and spent the money only to find the quality lacking. Often times the amount they spent was much higher than just buying something like an Epson V500 and having total control of the process and results. So... it may be worth running some trials at the big box type stores to see what they can produce. This may let you indeed do thousands of scans at a go, if you're willing to pay. (Although I think $150 for the Epson is just too good to pass up with the drawback that you are the labor force.)

The other firm I mentioned previously, Pixmonix -- uses the Nikon line of 5000/9000 scanners, which are very good.

And another place I forgot to mention is North Coast Photo in San Diego:
http://www.northcoastphoto.com/

North Coast uses a Noritsu QSS-3212 unit for scanning, with individual slide prices at around $2. They has a fine reputation for the quality of their work.

(I have no affiliation with any of these organizations others than knowing of them. I have not personally used any of them for my own work but just know them by reputation.)

Hope that helps. Sorry for adding too much detail!

[DaleMaley]

10,000 slides.......wow.....I can't imagine handling this many slides!

My parents took 2 rolls of slides each year (40 slides per year) for the 10 years between 1960 and 1969. I used a manual viewer and sorted out the best 240 slides. Many were completely black, some clear, and some so dark you could not make out the images.

I hired slidescanningpros to digitize my 240 slides at a cost of about 50 cents per slide. This includes the external hard drive they shipped me back with the digitized images on the hard drive. I don't have the time to manually handle even 240 slides. The big houses have really good software to remove all the black specs (which are dust) from 50 year old slides.

[BigFoot48]

I used a Canon 8400F flatbed scanner to scan over 2,000 slides a few years ago. It does four at a time, but it took several months to get it all done. Being retired is a big help. I would clean the slides, put them in the scanner, and as it was doing the scan select the next four to do and get them ready. I marked all the slides I scanned, marked slides with family in them, and labeled the top of each batch with the date, which is also in the file name. This will allow me to easily go back and find any should I want to rescan one. I was happy with the results and DIY savings.

However, I was somewhat disappointed, despite having used expensive cameras and lens, and Kodak film and processing, over the photographic quality of much of my work, and I'm afraid having these professionally scanned wouldn't have made them better! My pocket digital camera routinely makes better pictures. Youngsters don't appreciate, I suspect, on how good they have it!

I'm now doing photographs, three at a time. There's a lot of these. Also need to get the 20 empty circular slide trays and the projector over to Goodwill one of these days.

[umfundi]

However, I was somewhat disappointed, despite having used expensive cameras and lens, and Kodak film and processing, over the photograph quality of much of my work,

Isn't that the truth?

I am astounded at the quality I get from my auto-everything inexpensive gear today, as opposed to my manual expensive gear of yesterday.

Except, the wild cheetah ten feet away was then, not now.

Keith

[Viking65]

I posed a similar question last year, with the difference being that I would definitely farm this out to a professional to do:

viewtopic.php?f=11&t=95784

Since that time, and based in part on the input I received, I have had 3000-4000 negatives and slides scanned, more than 90% of my pre-digital images. We have used two services, both based in California: Pixmonix and goPhoto. Overall, I have been very pleased with the results. Both services have produced similar high quality digitized images, which I believe are about the best that could be teased from my Kodacolor, Kodachrome, and Ektachrome originals. Of these two, I would have to give the edge to goPhoto because you can view the images after they have scanned them and eliminate those you don't want, and pay only for those you keep. It usually costs around 50c per image, but both services have periodic sales, so if you are patient, you can get your images done substantially cheaper. Add the ability do a post-scan cull and pay only for what you keep (at goPhoto) and it becomes not too painful a price to pay. Considering now I have the vast majority of my original images digitized, sorted, and organized (and suitably backed-up of course).
I can totally understand those who want to invest the time to do it themselves, but boy was this the right solution for me.

[obgraham]

As I stated above, I'm one of the "scan 'em yourself" crowd.

But a question here for the "send 'em out" folks: Slides vary a whole lot in how they have survived the years in storage, especially Ektachromes. Some need color restoration, or contrast/brigjhtness adjusting. Many are best left as they are, but it seems to be an individual thing. Do the services make these adjustments to individual images, or is that something you have to fix afterwards?

[umfundi]

Here is a description of the Costco service:

http://www.costcodvd.com/slides_to_dvd.aspx

1.Each slide image manually scanned, cropped and color corrected
2.Digital removal or dust and dirt on the slides

Keith

[22twain]

* Clean the media before you put it in
* ICE does not usualy work well with kodachrome slides, so keep that in mind
* Black & White is far harder and will have more scratches.

And ICE (or anything that uses an infrared channel) works even worse with B&W negatives, because the silver in the negatives does a great job of absorbing infrared. When I do B&W negative scans I have to spend a lot of time touching up the dust spots.

Others have mentioned Vuescan software. I've used it for years and love it. It runs both my Nikon film scanner and the scanner in my cheap Canon printer / flatbed scanner combo, with the same interface. That interface does take a bit of practice to get used to, but it's not too bad.