Scanner vs digital camera

uberben · Oct 27, 2005

i doubt film will ever die, however it will get more and more expensive as demand drops. At least thats my thoughts.

zedin · Oct 30, 2005

Well I have in the past gotten the slides scanned to CD somethimes. At the place I go it is $5 however recently they have been lower resolution and nothing you can make even an 8*10. When asked I was told the old guy used to scan at too high a resolution. So get get a roll scanned now at a 5meg file per pic is an extra 10 bucks. So in total between film, developing, and scan it would be around 20-25 dollars per roll. Well doesn't take rocket science to figure out after 20 rolls the scanner would pay for itself. And it wouldn't even need to be 20 full rolls.. just enough pictures from 20 different sets of film since some of the pictures just are not worth getting scanned (not that I know that until I look at slide).

Didn't have much luck at Costco.. while the scans are high resolution there was a ton of noise espeically in the black. My flatbed would do better (until it broke that is =p).

So currently leaning towards the Minolta Dimage 4 (found here). It is just too expensive to get a decent scan done in a store on a slide by slide basis and the one store that does it for a resonable price did not produce very high quality.

Patrick · Oct 30, 2005

zedin said:
Well I have in the past gotten the slides scanned to CD somethimes. At the place I go it is $5 however recently they have been lower resolution and nothing you can make even an 8*10. When asked I was told the old guy used to scan at too high a resolution. So get get a roll scanned now at a 5meg file per pic is an extra 10 bucks. So in total between film, developing, and scan it would be around 20-25 dollars per roll. Well doesn't take rocket science to figure out after 20 rolls the scanner would pay for itself. And it wouldn't even need to be 20 full rolls.. just enough pictures from 20 different sets of film since some of the pictures just are not worth getting scanned (not that I know that until I look at slide).

Didn't have much luck at Costco.. while the scans are high resolution there was a ton of noise espeically in the black. My flatbed would do better (until it broke that is =p).

So currently leaning towards the Minolta Dimage 4 (found here). It is just too expensive to get a decent scan done in a store on a slide by slide basis and the one store that does it for a resonable price did not produce very high quality.

I've heard some good things about that scanner and you can't go wrong with B&H. I would however look into to buying a copy of VueScan. IMO it gives more control and better results than the software (excluding drivers of course) that comes with the scanner.