Help in scanner choice?

[Justinasia]

Hi everyone. I'm a beginner to photography. I'm a researcher and I gather old documents. Sometimes all I can get is the negatives from someones photos of documents. The documents are often large and handwritten and centuries old, so to see the detail and at times to clean them up to make readable for printing, I need to turn a negative into A3 size. I'm hoping you guys can advise me as to what kind of scanner I would need for this, or even specific model recommendations. What kind of resolution (dpi?) would be my requirement for example?

I don't need perfect colour. My requirements would be less than a keen photographer I guess but I am hoping to restore the detail from sometimes faded script so would appreciate detail. Obviously I don't want to have to spend more money than would be necessary to accomplish that.

Also I have seen some small scanners only for negatives which look quite portable. I wonder if these would be suitable or not? Being portable would certainly be useful for me though if this wouldn't be good enough I can go with a bigger one.

Many thanks for any advice.

 

[Vautrin]

What size film?

I bought the CanoScan 8800F recently and I'm quite happy with it. It's a little slow but it'll have the resolution you need (assuming your negatives are big enough and have small enough grain).

 

[Mike_E]

Hi, welcome to the forum!

I think that you will find that like anything else the better the quality the better off you are.

As to the hardware try here epson v750 - Google Search

You should also look into the works of Katrin Eastman who has been one of the better authors on photo restoring for quite some time.

Good luck!

 

[usayit]

I don't think its necessary to spend the extra on the V750. The V700 which is almost identical will be just fine.

 

[Justinasia]

Thanks guys. I went with the V600 in the end as it seems it should be good enough and saves some compared to the V700.