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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Topic Author's Original Post - Nov 30, 2012 - 10:09am PT
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A buddy of mine is coming down from Alaska with a few trays of slides from various trips we did BITD.
I've been looking around at slide scanners and it seems the good dedicated ones are fairly expensive. $250 or WAY more. There are some cheap looking ones for under $100 but I'm guessing that I would be disappointed with the results.
Another option might be to use a digital camera with macro lens to simply take pictures of them. Saw an article online where a guy seemed to get pretty good results that way. Regardless all I have is a P&S digital that I doubt would do well at this.
I would love any feedback on scanners folks have used that they like. Also perhaps someone near Reno might be willing to loan one (or a good dslr with macro lens) if they have it.
Any info or help appreciated!
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Timmc
climber
BC
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Nov 30, 2012 - 10:21am PT
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If it's only a few trays I would suggest taking them to a recommended place that scans.
It takes time to dial it all in and good scanners are expensive.
Good luck
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Srbphoto
climber
Kennewick wa
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Nov 30, 2012 - 10:33am PT
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One thing to consider is what are you going to do with the scans? If you want to make 16 X 20 prints, pro lab all the way. If you just want a digital copy to look at the cheaper alternatives will be ok.
I agree with Timmc. If it's not that many, it may be cheaper and you will get better results at a lab.
The macro thing requires a real macro (not the "macro" setting on a zoom) and to have everything lined up perfect to get good results.
I have seen good results from the Epson V500 flatbed scanner. It has the tray to do film scans (up to 2 1/4). You can find them for around $130 on sale if you look around.
The results I have seen from the cheap film scanners ($100) haven't been very good.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Nov 30, 2012 - 11:04am PT
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If you could find a slightly older Plustek for $200 you'd be pretty happy.
Their latest model was on sale at Samy's the other day for $260 or so.
No such thing as 'good' and $100 unless it is a good used one. Forget the
macro lens idea.
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10b4me
Boulder climber
member since 2002
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Nov 30, 2012 - 11:20am PT
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If it's only a few trays I would suggest taking them to a recommended place that scans.
I've done that. Depends on how many slides you are scanning. If it's a lot, it can be expensive. However, if you are only scanning slides one time, I would not spend the money on a scanner
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Keith Leaman
Trad climber
Seattle
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Nov 30, 2012 - 12:13pm PT
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Finding a decent 35mm slide copier wasn't simple. I wanted something small and easy to use so I tried the ION which for some reason didn't work with my MAC, and it cropped every slide just a little. Same with the Wolverine. They were slow, too. So after much searching, I ended up with the larger flatbed Epson Perfection V600 for about $200, included shipping at the time, through Amazon.
Being able to copy 2 1/4 slides was a big advantage. Plus, if you don't have a document scanner, it does that as well as negatives, large format and panoramas. The photo shops around here want $2 per slide which would have cost several hundred bucks to convert even a fraction of my art and climbing slides. A version of Adobe Photoshop Elements came with the copier.
Here's a sample of one of my 45 year old 2 1/4 transparancies taken with a very inexpensive camera. Looking down the friction pitch of the Exum rt. on the Grand Teton 1968. My partner at the bottom center just starting up. Good luck with the search.
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Radish
Trad climber
SeKi, California
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Nov 30, 2012 - 12:18pm PT
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I use a smooth white matte board and blow an image on it with a slide projector at the smallest size, which ends up around 5/7" then take a digital picture at a normal setting, hand held. I have had good results with some slides. I have also used slide viewers to do this same thing. Every slide has its own personality. This is a cheap option that can work and should be tried, unless of course your going for 16/20.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 30, 2012 - 12:34pm PT
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I have a standing offer to scan slides using my Nikon Coolscan 4000 ED (as long as it stays alive) for climbing subjects...
...it generally does a good (excellent) job up to 4000 dpi and better if the slides are flat (depth of field can be an issue on the scan, curved slides will have the focus fall of on the edges).
Usually scan the batch at 1000 dpi and go back for those slides that are worth while at 4000dpi.
If it is a really great project I can even go in and Photoshop out the dust, etc...
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Nov 30, 2012 - 12:39pm PT
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Nice of you, Ed.
So what do commercial outfits use?
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 30, 2012 - 12:48pm PT
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Wow Ed! I might take you up on that when my bud gets down here at least for his slides. He will be road trippin for a few months. I would like my own scanner although I doubt I will be able to get anything quite so good as that Nikon.
I have tons of old slides that I would do myself at lower quality only a small handful would really be worth high quality.
Thanks for all the input everyone.
Keith L. Ty for the info on the low end ION and Wolverine. Confirms what I suspected about not likely being happy with those
I had not seriously considered an Epson tray type scanner but for a lot of my stuff it seems like an affordable good enough solution.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Nov 30, 2012 - 12:50pm PT
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climbski, a flatbead capable of doing it decently will be about equal in price to
a Plustek with its much higher quality.
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Topic Author's Reply - Nov 30, 2012 - 12:53pm PT
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Yeah I know the Plustek is the way to go. Apparently similar in image result to Eds Nikon. But I just cannot justify that much expense for a one time thing for a few hundred pics only a few of which are really good. Most of em are just memory type stuff. Tempting though. Suppose I could just sell it after I'm done.
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weezy
climber
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Nov 30, 2012 - 02:18pm PT
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I have one of these collecting dust in my closet. I'd sell it for cheap but I have a feeling it'll be a bitch to set up on any newer OS.
Looks like Ed has the best deal going for your purposes.
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mouse from merced
Trad climber
The finger of fate, my friends, is fickle.
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Nov 30, 2012 - 02:31pm PT
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From what I can tell, the the Hammacher-Schlemmer slide & instamatic film and 35 neg. scanner Jim Shirley sent me is the same as the Ion $49.95 in the Amazon catalog. It's a three-way converter, no frills, it takes a lot to get the slides clean, like all of them, I imagine, unless they have a Sconman Friday in the dit. Then it's definitely worth it. Really?--it's probably not an option except for the lame. I am hobbling. FWIW.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Nov 30, 2012 - 02:32pm PT
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Weezy, "these" leaves a lot to the imagination. I have a lot of "these"
in a lot of closets. But we won't go there.
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Peter Haan
Trad climber
San Francisco, CA
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Nov 30, 2012 - 02:49pm PT
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My two cents on this long-running point of discussion is to simply get a flatbed scanner as they are so useful for other tasks as well as slide and negative scanning. They act as copiers for ordinary items at any resolution. They can handle opaque material on the bed, say a book or magazine page. They can do a marvelous job even beyond 4000 dpi with results good enough for most all of us. And a very good flatbed is $200, say a canoscan 9000F. Mine has been just great for many years now.
http://www.usa.canon.com/cusa/consumer/products/scanners/film_negative_scanners/canoscan_9000f
Better yet of course are the Epson 750, but they are four times the money.
http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/jsp/Product.do?sku=B11B178061
Dedicated slide scanners like Ed H's Nikon Coolscan 4000 (and models above this), now no longer made, are wonderful and fantastic and can be set up for rather high production with feeders even. But they remain only useful in this way while most households can really benefit from having the ability to also scan, preserve all kinds of non-transparent media.
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JLP
Social climber
The internet
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Nov 30, 2012 - 02:59pm PT
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scancafe.com rocks.
Otherwise, feel free to spend 1000's for a scanner as good, then work for 2 cents an hour for several months' worth of your free time, with no experience and skill for the task, on your whole slide collection, before realizing the results suck so bad you want to do everything over.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Nov 30, 2012 - 07:11pm PT
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scancafe looks like a practical solution...
I bought my scanner in the late 1990s instead of a high end digital SLR, and it was very cost effective when you could get film developed nearby
about 2 years ago the digital SLR resolutions surpassed my scanner... and the photofinishers in my area disappeared too.. probably not just coincidental.
You can still get better scan resolutions off of a scanned bit of film than from a dSLR (if you want to make posters, I have prints 24" x 36" off of a piece of 35mm film)... but certainly going forward a dSLR is a better bet.
For all that old film, high end flat bed scanners do remarkably well, I wouldn't buy a dedicated film scanner... BUT...I have one and it still works... I also have a 50 slide feeder so it is really easy to dump a bunch of slides in the hopper and let the scanner eat them up and produce good digital copies at 1000dpi very quickly. If the slides are warped it is a bit more of a pain.
All old slides usually need some love, aside from blowing the slide with canned air (and it really is just dry air) the other blemishes and dust are Photoshopped away.. that can take time for dirty slides...
Scanning negatives is also pretty straight forward. Color is just like slides, B&W usually requires some tweaking (but just because I'm that way)... and then there is the cleaning step...
I offer to do this for climbing slides because there are a lot of slides and negatives from back in the day that you all have that are just sitting in boxes moldering away... you could be telling stories with them that we would all like to hear (well, at least I would like to hear) and the images not only help to tell the stories, but also jog your memories.
And even if you sucked as a photog, the images have a historic significance that goes beyond fine art...
the other reason is that almost nobody takes me up on it... so I'm not very busy doing it...
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 1, 2012 - 12:35pm PT
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Well based on that I've sent you message WEEZY. Might work out good for both of us if you still want to move that ole Minolta scanner.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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I also use Vuescan. It is quite good and reasonably priced.
The other big one is Silverfast but it is quite a bit pricier and doesn't
support as many scanners as I recall. Silverfast has a fancier interface
and bells and whistles but supposedly isn't markedly better.
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 5, 2012 - 03:47pm PT
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Thanks for advice regarding Epson scanners!
Ok did not hear back from Weezy so today I went out and purchased an Epson Perfection V500 flatbed scanner. Not too expensive and I figured if it sucked I could take it back. This scanner has ICE which I thought (correctly) would be pretty important.
I am pleased with the first few results so far. Not sure sharpness is quite as good as original hard to tell without a loop or good projection surface. I am sure I can do even better with some more experience with the software and some fiddling. It is a tad on the slow side so many hours will be spent on a few hundred slides.
So here are a couple decent early results.
April 1991 trip
Sept 2001 A guy from Chamonix taken from fixed lines to Heart Ledge.
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 5, 2012 - 07:14pm PT
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I am having too much fun with my scanner. Gotta show a few pics :)
SUMMIT ELATION !!!!!!
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Dick Erb
climber
June Lake, CA
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I tried scan cafe, the price was reasonable, but I didn't like the results. So, I decided to improvise and made a slide copier for my camera. My only expense was a set of extension tubes that I bought from Adorama for about $70. The rest were a few wood scraps. The extension tubes fit between the lens and the body of my DSLR. By moving the lens further from the sensor they can provide a very close focus.
The tubes work best with a lens that is slightly telephoto. A 20mm tube and my zoom at about 55mm worked well for my Nikon D300.Something bright and white behind the slide is needed. After a little tinkering to get it dialed in you can start changing the slides and take pictures. Shooting a raw images gives me enough data to work with the image in Lightroom to get the tones and colors right. I can get better details in the shadows than the Scan Cafe images have.
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 5, 2012 - 09:24pm PT
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Yeah I'd like to have gone that way DE. It would definitely be quicker and I suspect get even better results.
I have been wanting to get a good DSLR but have not had enough extra scratch to justify it. Right now I have to settle for dreaming. I lust for a Canon 7D and some nice glass. About $1500 with just the first lens I'd like to have.
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Dick Erb
climber
June Lake, CA
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Here is a comparison.It was this slide which disappointed me with subbing out the scans and got me going on making a camera copier.
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JLP
Social climber
The internet
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I tried scan cafe, the price was reasonable, but I didn't like the results. My color negatives turned out the best, by far. My slides not as good. However, all I see are color issues, which are pretty fixable with software. 95+% of my photos were print film. Overall, I was pretty happy with the results. Out of 1000's of images, I'd say just a few dozen are worth additional attention, which I could certainly do.
Meanwhile, I even have those accidental shots of my feet - and I remember them - everything triggers a memory and I have it all - it would have taken me months, possibly years to scan all of those in on my own. I'm pretty happy with scancafe, for sure.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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cool direction the thread has taken...
This image was of a Jim Herson Salathe Wall free attempt, his partner on this day way Derek Powell... I snapped it on Ecktachrome 100 with my 180mm f2.8 Nikon lens mounted on my FM2N. This is the second of 2 shots, the first is blurry, both shots are "hand held." These images are all 520px wide by 800px tall "full crop" (which is to say there is no pixel compression)
here is the scan attempt from my Cannon Lide-110 at 600 dpi
I would need to figure out how to get the focus on the film, which is to say I'd have to take the film out of the slide to get a good scan.
here is an attempt at the "Dick Erb" solution, 50mm f1.4 Nikon lens with a 50mm extension tube shooting with my FujiFilm S5-Pro. This gives a 1-to-1 image, so the entire slide doesn't fit on the DX format camera (funny that!)
you can see that you have to have Dick's sort of setup, the depth of field is very short and being perpendicular to the film is essential to getting a good overall focus.
Here is the Nikon scanner at 4000dpi, this is the one I use:
and here is a commercially scanned image of the same slide at 8000dpi
this last one scan was printed at 24" x 36" and hangs on my wall... at 300dpi resolution the print is quite sharp...
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weezy
climber
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climbski2,
sorry i didn't return your message. it got caught in the spam filter and i just now saw it. glad to see you got a nice scanner. probably was a ton easier to set up than the old minolta i have.
anyway, i still have the scanner if anyone else is interested. i'll sell it for cheap or trade for something.
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nature
climber
Boulder, CO
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Dec 19, 2013 - 03:28pm PT
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Last night I decided to dig into my slides/photos/negatives and decided it's time to get some of them scanned. I have 17 years or so of B&W negatives and color slides to dig through. I'm tempted to use a commercial scanning service but given the total number I'd probably end up scanning it's probably more economical to use a scanner.
I've scanned slides before but to be honest I found the whole process a total PITA.
So I'm looking for recommendations on a decent/good scanner that lends itself to an economical workflow.
I realize these things should be illegal for assault rifles but do they make 100 capacity clips that you just plug in and the scanner does the rest? (I'm kidding but you have to admit that would be pretty fast workflow so you get the idea).
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nature
climber
Boulder, CO
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Dec 19, 2013 - 03:36pm PT
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oh that is pricey.
My issue is less with my slides - I probably only have about 800 that were worth keeping. Probably only need to scan maybe 500 of those.
It's all the B&W negatives I need to work through. Seems like the easiest way is to slowly work through them.
Nice offer Ed - maybe I can start with a handful to see how it goes. I started shooting slides back in 88. Rainer, JTree, Lurking Fear, Lunar, and more.
Plus I found a couple dozen shots of Ms. Summit from when she was not even 2 years old.
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nature
climber
Boulder, CO
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Dec 19, 2013 - 04:13pm PT
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Canon 60D and S100.
LightRoom 5
Ed - cut but the length varies. I spent two and a half years taking B&W photography in school and I usually cut them to a length of 5.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Dec 19, 2013 - 04:21pm PT
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5 is typical, 6 is more efficient with the negative feed I have
but I often setup in the scan frame and just push it to the next position, depending on how well the software is doing finding the frame edges (sometimes underexposed frames are difficult).
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