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Photo, Etc., Scanner

WalnutCreek Zone 7b/8a

14 years ago

I have tons of old photos, slides, and 35mm film I would like to scan. I have looked at scanners and reviews, as well as looked at comments on this forum (could find only a bit older info). Some of this media has spots and wrinkles that I would like to erase as much as possible. Therefore, I decided to come to the people who already use this technology and ask what do you use and what do you like about what you use.

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Comments (2)

owbist
14 years ago
You really have 2 separate issues here. You have the scanning which is relatively easy and the photo repair which is more of a challenge but a whole lot of fun if you can become interested.

Defining your "tons of photos etc" and what you want for a finished quality will determine the amount you are willing to pay for your scanner. When I first started a local company wanted $10 for the first scan and $8 for any others done at that time. Figuring that 6 and 4 are 8 and 2 is twelve I realised I could buy a scanner for the price of a dozen scans from the store. A good investment but in those days scanners were not as good as those around now.

I have an HP4890 that will individually scan as many photos as I can get on the plate and I can adjust the settings for each scan. Great time saver. I also scan quite large files because you can always reduce the size with no degradation but you cannot successfully increase the size after the scan. The larger the file the better it is when you start photo editing, repairing those damaged shots. Anything above 3 megabytes file size worked well for me.

During the scans I never bothered about colour intensity because that got taken care of when I brought them up in Corel PhotoPaint.
grandms
14 years ago
I have the Epson Perfection 3170 Photo scanner, which is an older model, but it has capabilities that I have never explored as yet. It can scan multiple photos, it can scan negatives and slides, and has settings for color enhancements. It can also scan to application, meaning that you can scan a photo and send it to another program for further enhancements such as repairing tears, etc. I don't know what photo/graphics program(s) you may have, but there are some fairly good free ones as well as those made by Adobe and Corel. As I recall, an older version of Adobe Photo Elements (CD) came with my scanner. So I would suggest that you shop and compare various scanners. I highly recommend those made by Epson.
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