Film scanner

[selmerdave]

I picked up an Agfa Duoscan T1200 for free the other day. In order to use it I need an SCSI interface for my computer, but other than that it should be ready to go. I know this scanner is several years old, but at the time offered fairly good performance. The question is, has scanning technology progressed such that I would be better off with a bottom of the line new scanner? Is it worth the $30 or $40 for a scuzzy card? Thanks.

Dave

 

[AIRIC]

I managed to get a Nikon coolscan from work the other day and a scsi card for my computer only to learn the scanenr is not supported with Windows XP

Eric

 

[usayit]

First question to ask yourself... what are your expectations. If you are looking for a photo scanner up to par with today's technology or something to add as part of your digital photolab for work, I would go ahead and pass it up for something recent. Now if you are looking to make simple scans for posting on the web and such, I say why not ... go ahead. 30-40 bucks isn't going to get you much these days anyways. It has an optical resolution of only 600x1200 dpi but it does support film and slides. The bad news is that its old and discontinued. The good news is that drivers for that scanner are available from Agfa for pretty recent operating systems; XP and OS X included.

Heck.. If you want a very fast external drive to use for photoshop work space, go ahead and daisy chain an external SCSI hard drive while you are at it. If you are somewhat of a geek, you would eventually attach a RAID set to that bus.

 

[selmerdave]

Thanks for the comments. I think I'll probably look into it. I don't think my expectations are particularly high, I'd be looking to save some money on paying to have scanning done and looking for acceptable if not stellar results. I'll report back when I get it running.

Dave