Negative Scanner

[foges]

Hey, i have an slr camera, but i love computers as well so it would be really great to have them on my computer at a good quality though. So i am looking for your advice on a good scanner at a reasonable price. It would be really cool if it for example had a negative feeder, like a printer has a paper feeder so that i didnt have to scan one picture at a time and i could just put in all negatives and let it scan for however long it takes to get a good photo size.

Thanx

ps do you guys know of any place where you can send in film and just get the negatives sent back without the actual fotos (for hopefuly a lower price). I live in europe btw

 

[Don Simon]

Hi there, I guess it depends on what you consider a reasonable price. My idea of a reasonable price for a scanner used for light to moderate hobby use would be around the £150 mark (or about $275 USD or 220 Euros) so I went for the Canon CanoScan 8400F, which is a 3200dpi flatbed scanner with a negative adapter. With this you place a strip of film into the adapter, lock it in place and then just scan it. The interface is pretty easy; you preview the negatives then scan the ones you want. If you really don't want to manually place the negatives on the scanner then you'll probably have to go for a dedicated negative scanner, which can usually be found at a quite unreasonable price (IMO, unless you'll be using it a lot). You might be able to pick up a second-hand dedicated scanner on Ebay, but these are not usually top of the rangte so I'd suggest you just go for the flatbed and have the convenience of being able to scan other media. I can recommend the Canon (I had a slight fault with mine, which is currently being replaced, but the scanning quality was very good). The Epson Perfection series have also had some good reviews.

Some people will tell you that only a dedicated scanner will produce decent results. I disagree with this. It would seem logical that a dedicated negative scanner would produce better results than a scanner for which negative scanning is only one of many functions. But how much better? If you can only notice the difference with big enlargements, then does it matter? The dedicated scanner may be faster and it may be easier to load film, but then how regularly are you going to be scanning film? In short, obviously a 7200dpi dedicated negative scanner would be a nice thing to have, but do you really need all that technology and are you really willing to spend that much extra for it?

As for labs that just develop film without making prints, yes there are plenty. I imagine most photographic shops would do this, and there are plenty of mail-based ones too. Peak Processing in the UK is one of the latter that has received some good reviews; where exactly are you? Europe is quite large :mrgreen:.