Jim Nichols wrote:
> Moose,
>
> You might consider the path that I took when we decided to digitize my late
> father-in-law's negatives, from 120 through split 5x7 portrait negatives. I
> bought an early Epson Perfection 2450 scanner off of the auction site.
Thanks for the suggestion, Jim. I'm already set, though. I bought a
used, but like new, Canon 9950F, which is roughly comparable in
capability to the current high end Epson V700. It doesn't have a holder
for 5x7, but I have nothing larger than 4x5 to scan. I've tried a few,
and it does an excellent job with MF film at far less than its 4000 dpi
maximum. I was also attracted by the ability to scan 5 strips of 35mm
negs or 12 slides at once, for the project below.
,,. I still have a long way to go to finish the job, but the results are not
bad at all.
Much of my justification for buying the scanner was for scanning my and
my fathers negs and slides. There is just a sea of them, and I just
found another big box I had forgotten. Much of it will be junk, of
course. But I've been amazed at the color and detail in scans of old
negs from family snaps that were never seen except as 3" x 5 1/2",
crappy prints, so I'm also sure there are gems hiding in the boxes.
This will be a long term project. I need to do some more testing, to get
software settings right, determine scanning dpi and bit depth for
different ypes and ages of film, and so on. I've determined, for
example, that anything over about 2000 dpi and 8 bit color is wasted on
Kodachromes from the late 30 and early 40s - big grain and limited
dynamic range. Oh yeah, uninspiring lens(es?) and frequent motion blur,
too. It was slooow film.
Then I plan to settle into a routine of sticking film in the scanner
every day and scanning away, even if I don't look at them immediately.
As disk space becomes cheaper, this becomes a practical approach. It
seems easier to me than trying to peer at strips of negs that have
become separated from their prints, trying to evaluate slides on a
sorting table or setting up a projector and projecting endless slides
and taking notes.
Flipping through the scans using an indexing program and rating them as
I view them seems the way to go and separate out the ones worth doing
anything with. In the end, I plan to create DVD libraries for my
brothers, sons, grandchildren, nieces and nephews.
> As an added benefit, the scanner turns my computer into a copier and fax
> machine as a bonus.
>
I already had that with the prior scanner, and still do with the 9950F.
Very handy.
Moose
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