Negative scanning

[simbloke]

I've always meant to go back and scan my negatives from years gone by but it looks like I might be leaving it a bit late. Seems like all the big photo players are not in that market anymore. About all I can see in the UK are the £50-100 devices on Amazon that I imagine are not very good, and Plustek in the £200-300 range, that's about it.

Reading around the web I hear good and bad things about the Plustek scanners. No matter what the product it seems lots of 'great' reviews are by people who are amazed at the concept of a product never mind whether it's a good product in its class.

Some people on photo forums recommend using a DLSR with either a rig to hold the camera or an attachment such as the one Nikon sell that holds the film. The issue there would be my camera is old, just 6Mpixels, and I don't have a macro lens.

Suggestions most welcome!

 

[simbloke]

Thanks that's useful. I'm not a professional either or I might have see the situation coming.

 

[Blumlein 88]

I've an older Canon 8400F that did quite well on negative scans. Alas they didn't continue supporting it with drivers. I have an Epson Perfection V370 and it does okay on negative scans, but wasn't as good as the old Canon or quite good enough to satisfy me. I wish I had spent a bit more and went with the Plustek which seems pretty good. The Epson is around $200 now, and I think they are about to drop it. I purchased it for $130 awhile back.

The method of using a DSLR is maybe the very best if your DSLR is up to date. But it is time consuming and inconvenient.

EDIT to add: I had the attachment for a Nikon. That works pretty well if you can get an even and bright illumination to it. My best results were using a white piece of poster paper outdoors on a sunny day, and bouncing that to the adapter. I think mine was 6 mp too as I recall. So the pictures had good color and everything just not the max resolution negatives are capable of. Not bad though as a good 6 mp picture is not bad at all. Unfortunately the Nikon camera died, and my next one was/is a Canon.

 

[phrwn]

Having scanned thousands of negatives on a Nikon film scanner and an Epson flatbed I'd highly recommend sending the job out to a shop. It's massively time consuming, very painstaking, and frequently problematic; scanner software is either out of date or very clunky. Then you have to clean and edit the scans... ugh.

I may be jaded. Ignore if you enjoy clone stamping scratches for hours.

 

[simbloke]

Yes I have read that the scanners can be slow and the software sometimes tedious.

 

[JeffS7444]

I've always meant to go back and scan my negatives from years gone by

During the most restrictive part of lockdown in 2020, I did a number of dawn-to-dusk scanning sessions using an Epson V700 flatbed scanner and Silverfast AI Studio software. And overall, I'm pretty happy with the results.

After much experimentation, I settled upon the following routine for the bulk of my scans:
Using stock Epson film holders rather than my fancy 3rd party glass carrier, I did single-pass 3200 DPI scans using Silverfast AI Studio, no multi-exposure, no additional pass for automatic dust removal either. Besides greatly increasing scan times, I discovered that registration of multi-pass scans was often less than perfect, leading to images which were noticeably fuzzier, and which sometimes had the wrong area of the film cloned. I grew to appreciate how SIAS displayed thumbnails of all images loaded into the film holders, allowing me to quickly tweak framing, exposure and color individually as needed, then I could walk away as it batch-scanned the lot. I think I was averaging around 150 scans per day on a good day.

 

[tgray]

Plusteks aren't bad, nor are the Epson V7xx scanners.

I moved on from a Nikon Coolscan to scanning with a digital camera, but I currently have way too much money in that system. Best scans I've ever gotten, but wouldn't recommend it unless you want to get way down into the details.

I'd send them out if you are okay with the results and have the money.

 

[johnp98]

I scanned >20,000 old slide photos (35mm kodachrome) for my father birthday and it was quite the undertaking.
I did lots of research and reading around about the best way to do it and so I have a few observations.

1) Flatbed scanners are very slow! We got one and tried it, but it was averaging >1min per slide when you took into account the loading, scanning, unloading etc. It was clear that we never were going to get it done that way. So we sold the scanner and moved on.

2) We used a tripod facing straight down, a light table / tablet, a DSLR camera with a macro lense, connected directly to out laptop so it imported photos as we went, and then I made a custom holder for the slides (just an L bracket so I could slide a slide on and off in under 1 second and it would keep perfect positioning every time). This was revolutionary and could let us take ~10-20 photos per minute so more than a 10x upgrade (and the quality was actually superior with a nice macro lense). A less extensive system would also yield good results I am sure.

3) Having done all the photos now and the time sink that it was, it almost would have been worth it to just send it out and have someone do it. But I am glad that I got to "see" all the photos as I took them and sure learned a bunch about photography doing it.

So in sum, dont do a flatbed scanner if you have any true volume of slide, strongly consider a camera and a light table, also consider sending them out.
Reach out if you want further info!

 

[JeffS7444]

I scanned >20,000 old slide photos (35mm kodachrome) for my father birthday and it was quite the undertaking.
...
3) Having done all the photos now and the time sink that it was, it almost would have been worth it to just send it out and have someone do it. But I am glad that I got to "see" all the photos as I took them and sure learned a bunch about photography doing it.

Gotten a quote for slide scanning lately?

 

[julian_hughes]

Having scanned thousands of negatives on a Nikon film scanner and an Epson flatbed I'd highly recommend sending the job out to a shop. It's massively time consuming, very painstaking, and frequently problematic; scanner software is either out of date or very clunky. Then you have to clean and edit the scans... ugh.

I may be jaded. Ignore if you enjoy clone stamping scratches for hours.

All true! I have a Nikon SUPER COOLSCAN 4000 ED. It makes superb scans from 35mm negative or transparency but it is an epic task if you have more than a few strips to scan. The original Nikon software was always horribly prone to failure. You can use Vuescan but nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to make this task speedy or carefree. For rollfilm scans I used to hire space at a pro lab and use their bigger, meaner, faster, eye-wateringly expensive Nikon scanners. They had all the same issues with the software as I had at home! Vuescan is probably the best software solution out there. It is fabulous for regular flat bed scanning and makes film scanning almost tolerable, bringing a modern user interface to old hardware. It's well worth the one off price.