Film Scanners

[vonDrehle]

I have been looking at film scanners on the internet and wonder if someone could explain exactly what they do and if one would be a good purchase.
From what I have read it seems that you take your negatives, scan them and there you go. But I don't know if that is all there is too it.
Do you need a dark room to get the negatives?
Do you have to get a program that will color the photos for you?

All help is appreciated. And if you could suggest any good scanners that would also help me a lot.

Price $2000 or less. But I’d rather pay more if it gets a much better scanner.

Thank You.

Also I'm sure my computer can handle it with 1.5 gigs but if not please tell me.

 

[John the Greek]

2000$ or less?... well... there's a lot of quality film scanners that run around 200-300$.

 

[Unimaxium]

Film scanners scan processed negatives and slides, so you can get digital copies of them on your computer. This means you do have to get the film processed at a lab before you scan it. Most labs can scan film to a CD for you at a price, but the advantage of having your own scanner is that you can do it yourself and you won't be charged for each photo you scan. It's a good idea if you shoot a lot of film. That way you can have the lab just process the negatives and not print or scan them, which makes it a lot cheaper. Then you do it yourself when you get home.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean when you ask about coloring the images. If you scan color film, you'll get color images. If you scan B&W film, you'll get B&W images. If you want you could theoretically use something like Photoshop to color the B&W images yourself, as well as to adjust the color balance of color images. You can do just about anything with Photoshop.

And are you talking about your computer having 1.5 gigs of storage space or do you mean 1 gigahertz? Either way, that's not a lot. If you're talking about gigahertz, then that should be enough to be able to edit your photos in something like Photoshop without many problems. If you're talking storage space, then 1.5GB is really not a lot of storage space. I currently have over 4 gigs of photos I've scanned from my film scanner (all were scanned at high resolution). I also once had a photo that, after I scanned it at top resolution and quality, and then edited it a lot in photoshop, totalled over 1 gig. I deleted it, though because it came out like crap in the end. If you're going to start collecting a bunch of digital photos, you definately need more than 1.5GB of space.

As for recommendations, I have heard the Plustek Opticfilm 7200 is quite good, and goes for a very good price. The one I currently use is the KonicaMinolta Dimage Dual IV Scanner. Also a good scanner for the price.