Does anyone have any experience of using slide scanners? I have many hundreds of slides dating back over many foreign birding trips and would like to convert the best ones to digital format. I bought a Jenoptic scanner some time ago but was very disappointed with the results. Do the top of the range models (Canon, Nikon, etc) give good results?
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Slide Scanners (1 Viewer)
- Thread starter van_ellus
- Start date
Dave Adshead
How much!
Slide sanners
I use a Nikon slide scanner which I consider to be very good. I have slides going back years that I intend to scan, its not a fast process but you soon get the swing of things. The dust and scratch removal is fantastic, one of my favorite slides has a scratch across the middle, but this scanner completely removes it.
Nikon are abit tight though, the money they charge for the scanner and they can not be bothered to put in a printed manual. Its on a supplied CD and is 139 pages long and took me over 1 hour to print it off, you really do need to print it off, because you will be constantly refering to it.
I hope this helps, any more questions feel free to ask
Best wishes
Dave
I use a Nikon slide scanner which I consider to be very good. I have slides going back years that I intend to scan, its not a fast process but you soon get the swing of things. The dust and scratch removal is fantastic, one of my favorite slides has a scratch across the middle, but this scanner completely removes it.
Nikon are abit tight though, the money they charge for the scanner and they can not be bothered to put in a printed manual. Its on a supplied CD and is 139 pages long and took me over 1 hour to print it off, you really do need to print it off, because you will be constantly refering to it.
I hope this helps, any more questions feel free to ask
Best wishes
Dave
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van_ellus said:
Yes the top of the range models do give excellent results. Using my Minolta 5400 and a properly exposed slide I have produced A4 prints that are better than I get from the high street. (A home scanner and printer will show you how poor some high street outlets are.) What's more I have full control over the print, so I can contrast mask, crop etc according to taste.
The latest 4000 DPI ones are good for A3 prints. A 2700 DPI one is good for A4 prints. Even some flatbed scanners can give excellent results to A4 , or so I am told.
You really want ICE/FARE as scanning a lot of slides as you don't want to spend 10 minutes touching up each scan.
Geoff Brown
Well-known member
My flatbed scanner is a top of the range Canon 9900F Not cheap but gives great results on anything scanned in including slides. lots of software and a good printed manual as well. :eek!:
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I've got the Minolta 5400, which is a nice piece of kit (and looks good on the desk!), but I rarely use it at full resolution. There generally isn't sufficient detail in my slides, although maybe there would be if I had used professional lenses. So, depending on the quality of your photographic equipment, and maybe the film you used, maybe you could get away with something with lower resolution and cheaper.
van_ellus said:
I use an HP S20 slide scanner. Resolution is excellent. Specially designed to scan slides, 35mm negatives and small prints. Attached is a slide of a Red Crested Korhaan in the Kruger Park I took on slide flim some years ago and scanned.
Rod Tucker
Attachments
GerryHerd
Well-known member
I'm now using a Nikon IV-ED scanner for those increasingly rare times I shoot negative or slide film. If you go the film scanner route, definitely get one that provides ICE (for scratch dust removal), ROC (restoration of color if old or faded slides are in your collection), and GEM (grain management). If you have a lot of slides to scan in, consider one that has a batch feeder so you can load in a stack of slides and go away for a few hours while they're being scanned. Scanning a single slide on my 2900 dpi IV-ED takes several minutes and produces a tif file around 25 or 30 MB. There are 4000 & 5400 dpi scanners readily available, but the filesize and (I'm guessing) time per slide will go up proportionately. The point is, slide scanning is a fairly tedious task. Depending on how many slides you want to scan out of the hundreds you've accumulated, and expected number of future slides, you might find it more cost effective to send the slides off to a good lab and let them do high-resolution scans for you.
