Slide and Negative Converters

smo · Oct 25, 2007

I am interested in putting all my shoeboxes of negatives onto my PC. I was looking at a Veho Film & Slide Converter from Brookstone.

Has anyone had experience with this product? Are there other options or similar/better products out there?

smo

Alex_B · Oct 25, 2007

If it is lots of slides and negatives, and if you want quality, then I would look into desktop Nikon film scanners. You could buy the ED5000 if you only have 35mm-film and slide and sell it on ebay again after you finished the scanning.
You can add a slide feeder to batch process slides and other add ons allow to scan rolls of negative film in one go.

If you also need to scan medium format, you would need something like the ED9000 which is considerably more expensive.

Be prepared to need a lot of harddisk space and a fast computer to handle the amount of data generated

kjevans · Mar 13, 2009

smo said:
I am interested in putting all my shoeboxes of negatives onto my PC. I was looking at a Veho Film & Slide Converter from Brookstone.

Has anyone had experience with this product? Are there other options or similar/better products out there?

smo

I am looking at a Veho VFS004 and have just heard back from them that the best print size I could hope to achieve from a 35mm neg is 6x4 or 7x5.

I was generally looking for something that could achieve at least 8x10 without the massive expense of getting the Nikon.

Any other ideas anyone?

Regards..,

blash · Mar 13, 2009

That is a really low-quality scanner - people complain about poor quality and 5 MP is very low for film. Get an Epson V500 and scan at 4800 dpi and you will pretty much be able to blow things up to whatever size you want. (I think 5 MP is equivalent to 1 point something thousand dpi?).

kjevans · Mar 13, 2009

blash said:
That is a really low-quality scanner - people complain about poor quality and 5 MP is very low for film. Get an Epson V500 and scan at 4800 dpi and you will pretty much be able to blow things up to whatever size you want. (I think 5 MP is equivalent to 1 point something thousand dpi?).

Thanks.
Reading up on this Epson, it is exactly what I am after.
A real nice piece of kit.
The cheapest new I have found is here:-
Digital Cameras, Digital Camera, Digital cameras camcorders - review and buy UK

and I think that is an excellent price.

Thanks very much for letting me know about it.

Regards.., :thumbup:

Garbz · Mar 15, 2009

How into DIY stuff are you? Do you have a macro lens? Built a small film holder, illuminate it from the bottom and take a photo from the top with the macro.

We have a scanner with dedicated film holder and backlight and frankly it's fine for a single roll, but since it takes about 40min to scan all frames at 4800dpi it may be a pain for loads of photos. Something to think about when looking for scanners is the speed.

With the DIY rig it's a click slide click slide click slide, rinse repeat till all films are done, and then batch process the negative inversion in photoshop. Results looks similar to the scan.

kjevans · Mar 15, 2009

Garbz said:
How into DIY stuff are you? Do you have a macro lens? Built a small film holder, illuminate it from the bottom and take a photo from the top with the macro.

We have a scanner with dedicated film holder and backlight and frankly it's fine for a single roll, but since it takes about 40min to scan all frames at 4800dpi it may be a pain for loads of photos. Something to think about when looking for scanners is the speed.

With the DIY rig it's a click slide click slide click slide, rinse repeat till all films are done, and then batch process the negative inversion in photoshop. Results looks similar to the scan.