Company to scan negatives...

[vegasbelle]

Hello, I am new here.

I have A LOT of negatives that I would love to have scanned. Can anyone recommend a company that is reliable and does good work.

Thank you in advance!

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[benhasajeep]

How many is alot? What size negatives? What quality level do you want? If you have a couple thousand 35mm or MF it would be better to buy your own Nikon Coolscan scanner. If you want really top notch scans, you will want drum scans. Nikon's Coolscan scanners are very good, but limited to medium format for largest size.

Welcome to TPF.

[vegasbelle]

Thank you for the information. I have hundreds of 35mm negatives. So your recommendation to just buy a scanner might be the best for me. Excuse my ignorance, but would a scan from a negative be higher quality that from a photo?

[benhasajeep]

Thank you for the information. I have hundreds of 35mm negatives. So your recommendation to just buy a scanner might be the best for me. Excuse my ignorance, but would a scan from a negative be higher quality that from a photo?

It really deppends on how many you have, and if you have the time to do it. Nikon Coolscans are very good units for 35mm. They don't offer the least expensive one from the factory anymore. But if you can still find a Coolscan V it should only be about $600 from a retailer. I have a Super Coolscan 5000 and it works very very well. But it retails for about $1,100-$1,200. So you really need to figure out where the break even point is for you. I still shoot slide film so I still need a scanner for future use. If you are just doing a couple hundred scans and thats it. It may not be worth it to buy one.

There are less expensive dedicated film, and a couple flat bed scanners with 35mm film capability that do pretty good too. But the Nikon's are about the best short of drum scanning.

The one thing about doing it yourself is you can give each one individual attention. If you pay a service to do it. You will get all of them batch scanned will little or no corrective inputs except automatic. Of course unless you pay extra for the "custom" scanning.

At best quality it takes a couple minutes a scan. So, doing it yourself will take awhile. But again you can make corrections and changes that the auto modes may not fix.

Scans from negatives would be the best results. I also have a flat bed scanner and at full resolution it starts to pic up paper patterns. It also does film. And though the results are good. The Nikon is much better in final quality. But there are some decent flatbed scanners that have dedicated film scanning capabilities. It really deppends on the quality level of what your looking for. If your ok with say 8x10 and small prints a $200-$500 flat bed scanner may also do you well. But they might be a bit slower though. My flatbed will do 24 frames of 35mm at a time. But for quality wise I use the Nikon.

[Dwig]

...would a scan from a negative be higher quality that from a photo?

Assuming the scanner is good enough at scanning film and assuming that the original negative has not degraded significantly (fading, fungus, creases and folds, ...), you will always get better results scanning the original film compared to scanning a print. A print is a copy of the original and never contains 100% of the data in the original film.