Scanning Photographs

[admin]

Unless you are a teenager who probably has never seen a film camera, you will probably have quite a few old photos that only exist as hard copies of images captured on film. These could be pictures from your school and college days or old black and white or even sepia prints of your parents [...]http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ProudPhotographyBlog/~4/437761413

Read the complete post... (http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ProudPhotographyBlog/~3/437761413/)

[jerryph]

One thing that the article doesn't touch on is the fact that ordinary scanners as we know them in the computer world are not these scanners. They won't work correctly. Unfortunately, digital film scanners are quite a lot more expensive, often going as high as $12,000 or more!

Nikon makes some of the best scanners for our needs, but you do not need to buy them. Unless you have 10s of thousands of pics to scan, it is not reasonable to purchase one of these units, but you can rent them and do your scanning in batches. Dedicate a day or a weekend at a time, and you can plan out batches of negatives you want to do in advance and how you will do it.

My personal preference is to scan at 600 DPI, a fair compromise between time and quality. I did them all at that level and was very happy with the results. If I wanted to send someone a smaller web-sized version, I simply resized the ones that I wished to share at a later date.

[jerryph]

I also found a very cheap solution, however the resolution is lower, but you don't even need a computer to scan:

http://secure.serverlab.net/shop/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=F2D100&Category_Code=&Store_Code=T00107