Want to buy a scanner

[ahelg]

I'm thinking about buying a scanner for my negatives but I have a few questions I need answered first.

1) Does it matter how the negatives are cut? My photolab did some rather bad work when cutting a few of my negatives. My latest negatives are cut like this.

3
6
6
6
6
6
3

The ones that only have three negatives also contain excess (some unused part of the negative). Will this make scanning difficoult?

2) Is there any scanners which can scan pictures in the new DNG format? I would like to scan my images in uncompressed high-quality format.

 

[mygrain]

The epson flatbeds I've used come with a 35mm negative/ slide holder the the negs slip into. They also give you a choice to scan and view via thumbnails or the entire neg strip. The negative holder does all the work for cropping the image and you just have to keep things steady and dust free. I've had negatives cut to odds sizes too and they all come out great.

 

[voodoocat]

I'm going to pimp the Minolta Scan Dual IV since no scanner in that price range can touch the quality. You can scan at 16 bit TIFF which is uncompressed and as high of quality as you can get. $300 new.

 

[GerryDavid]

I havent heard of any flatbed scanners that scan negatives that dont make the image a bit soft, but I havent researched them either.

From what I heard the negative holders keep the negative off of the glass by a bit, placingn it out of the focus range and making it soft.

And about the dng format, my flatbed scanner lets me open the file directly into any program I want like photoshop, and from there you can save it into any format you want.