negtive scanners

[tom beard]

I've been photographing for more years than I care to remember; most of those years with 35mm film. Now that i'm shooting digital, one of the advantages is cataloging and storing images. I must have a couple of thousand (or more) frames of color negative. I've shopped around for negative scanners, and they are rather expensive. If I bought one and scanned every neg I have, probably one or two percent would be worth saving. After that, what do I do with the scanner?

Has anybody used a scanning service who does a good job (clean the negs etc.), and would the cost for about 2K frames be competetive with buying a scanner?

Thanks to you all for answering all my questions. I'm really learning a lot! Also, thanks to the Photo Forum for being not only the best, but the easiest to use and the most civilized photo web site around.

Tom Beard

 

[musicaleCA]

Haven't used them (don't have any negs to scan), but I've heard great things about Scan Cafe. For a few cents per image, I hear that you get a corrected (dust and scratch removal, by hand) image and uncorrected TIFF. And apparently you can be a little obsessive and always find out exactly where your film is and what's being done with it; they apparently have a great tracking system.

 

[Battou]

Buy a scanner...Aproximately two grand, yeah Scanner of your own would be your best course of action.

With your own scanner you have complete control over the scan and what gets scanned, additionally once you have everything you want scanned done, You can either phence the thing off on E-Bay and get some of the expence back or you could keep it around and shoot some more 35mm in the future.

 

[farmerj]

I wish I would have gotten the transperency adaptor for my scanner years ago. Now I have to go and invest all over again in a new one. Nothing wrong with what I have, other than no adapter.

my dad has an HP with the transparency adapter on his. He's been scanning stuff for years now. Slides and negatives.

I use mine for the computer at the same time to scan documents as well. nice to scan things in for legal or other reasons and then archive them that way.

My divorce, army and education records are all done that way and kept on a single (multiple copies exist) CD.

There's more uses for that scanner than just to have a scanner for pictures, negatives and slides.

 

[Battou]

There's more uses for that scanner than just to have a scanner for pictures, negatives and slides.

Unless one gets one like mine :lmao: Dedicated to 35mm and APS....Not that I use the APS adapter....I dunno where it even is at this moment

 

[farmerj]

I got laid off in april and one of the "brainstorms" me and a co-worker discussed is to start a scanning service.

I did some checking with the local business that offer if, and it's not much business for them. For most, it's an "inconvenient convenience" for there customers.

to be cost competitive, a lot of these places take your images and ship them overseas to asia where the labor is cheap. About the only way to do this is very hands on.

From the ScanCafe website.

Fortunately, Laurent was also attending business school at the time with our other co-founders, Sam Allen and Naren Dubey. He shared his frustrations with them and together they decided there had to be a better way. The essential problem: how to deliver the high quality that only craftsmanship and manual processing can bring to scanning, but at an affordable price. That required finding a labor force that fit those two bills. After looking at a number of locations around the world, they decided to locate our scanning facility, now the world's largest, in Bangalore, India.

To do image correction is as well. While one can write scripts for doing some of the work, most will have to be completed by a person.

Cost of most flatbed scanners adequate to allow you to scan documents at home is $150-250 for a decent one.

At 24 cents an image only to scan. Doesn't take long to make it cost effective to buy your own scanner.