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Photo, Etc., Scanner

WalnutCreek Zone 7b/8a

12 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
12 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
12 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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I have an Epson V200 scanner. It is a flatbed scanner that can also slide film and slides. I paid around $80 for it. I bought this over a year ago. I am not sure of the availabilty of this certain model, as it has been discontinued, - other than eBay or Amazon. I can scan up to 4 slides at once. You load the slide tray and press scan. It puts each slide into a seperate file. You can specify where you want them saved. It is quite simple to use and I have been extremely happy with the results. It will scan at up to 4800 dpi. I generally scan my slides at a resolution of 600 dpi - and can get fantasic 4x6 prints. If you were looking to make poster size prints, you would want to up your dpi. The higher the dpi - the larger the file and the longer it takes to scan. If you do not have a lot of "horsepower" in your computer, scanning at really high dpi will take a long time. Scanning dpi and printing dpi are two entirely different things. You can google and research this further if you want. This is a slide from the early 1950's, scanned at 600 dpi. You can correct dust, backlighting, etc. I think HP has a flatbed scanner that can scan 16 slides at a time..this would be sweet if you are looking at a large number of slides. I love my Epson scanner - but have also been happy with HP scanners. I have attached a link to HP. It is very informative regarding slide scanning. Here is a link that might be useful: Slide scanning - from HP
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It is a new scanner at Staples. The reason I want to reproduce my photos is to save the price of using the negative to make copies. With my daughters sports teams I have often made a one page summary for each girl(yes, I am crazy and addicted) and if I want to use my original for my daughter and personalize the other girls with a picture in it then I need a copy. I also give my mother and in-laws each a copy of a page that I have done and I take them in and get them color copied for $1.50 each. If I had a scanner and would be happy with the copy I would save that cost. I used to take my negatives in and get all those copies, all the special stickers, papers, etc. and although the printer copy is not 100% as good, it is close.
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I'm glad you posted this! Very often someone will mention a recipe here and next thing you know someone posts a recipe that they say they make and it's obvious its from an internet site. No mention of the original or credit given to them. A gal up the street from me put a recipe on her blog that came from the Food Network website. Innocent enough so she thought. She got an email from the network asking to see the permission she had to post it. Of course she didn't have it and they made her remove it. I think people just think if its on the internet its theirs for the taking and that's just not so.
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