Options with old photo negatives

[detcord]

Hello all, I have a question and hope this is the right place to ask. If not please feel free to move this to the appropriate forum section. Recently I bought a hundred year old house, and while cleaning the attic found approximately 300 or so old photo negatives. They measure approximately 4 inches by 3 1/2 inches, and appear to be in good shape. I sent two of them off to a company in Ohio, just to see if they were still viable, and got back beautiful prints from them. The only problem is that the processing costs were around $10.00 a print. I feel that they were well worth that, but just don't have the money for the other 298. Are there any hobbyist setups that might work to at least see what images might be here? Hope this is not a stupid question. Thanks, Kevin

 

[compur]

Yes, a film scanner. That is, a scanner that has film scanning capabilities. They start at around $100.

 

[Derrel]

I scanned some old large folding camera negatives of about the same size using an Epson Perfection 3200 photo scanner with negative/slide scanning capabilities, and made some lovely 13 x 19 inch prints using an EPSON 1280 photo printer.

 

[sm4him]

You CAN buy a scanner and do it yourself...in my experience, it's quite a time-consuming process. You can also google "negative scanning" and finds scores of places like ScanCafe that will do it for you--but it'll cost you and I'm not sure any of them would do a low-resolution scan first just so you can see what you've got.

I might be willing to do low-res scans for you...for the right price. Or for a barter of the right equipment. Assuming you're in the U.S....

 

[Helen B]

Do you have any kind of digital camera with a close-up feature available to you? Take a picture of the negative against an evenly-illuminated background, then invert it with one of the free image editors that will do inversion. With a little practice you will soon be able to read the negatives just by looking at them in front of a white piece of paper, no need for any fancy gear.

 

[BlackSheep]

The other thing you could try is to negotiate a bulk price with the lab, give them a call, let them know how many negs you have, and ask them what their best price would be for that quantity. The lab I used to work for would absolutely give a bulk discount for something like that.

 

[sm4him]

Don't know if you found a solution for processing all those negatives, but the daily Groupon for my city (Knoxville, TN) is $40 for $100 worth of "digitization" services at ScanDigital. Not sure if they're offering it in your city or not, but since ScanDigital is an online service, you could always just choose a different city from the Groupon homepage and buy the deal. I've bought deals from other cities before, when they are for online services, and never had a problem.
It says that the $100 value would allow you to do 175 negatives, so you could buy two Groupons and get all the negatives processed for $80.

 

[Cruzingoose]

For 50 cents each I'll print them properly (in the darkroom), and include return shipping.