Photo and slide scanners

Matthew

Matthew

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Matthew
I've "come into" a lot of photo albums and 35mm slides.

I do have a flatbed scanner, one of those all-in-one, but it's not very handy for large volumes of photos and it won't do slides.

Any suggestions on scanners for that application?

I know it may be 2 different scanners, though, one for the photos and another for the slides.
 
For slides, if you have a Nikon DSLR, you probably won't find a better solution than Nikon's ES-2 (or ES-1) thing that mounts on one of their three "micro" lenses. Actually, this should work with any camera it can mount to but it contains no optics so it takes a lens that can focus to 9 inches or so and for instance Canon doesn't make any full-frame RF or EF lenses that do that. I still use it, but with reduced resolution on my RP (have to crop).

The other cheapo solution if you have a lens that can do 1:1 at a moderate distance (and this works great if your slides are already in trays) is to take the lens out of your slide projector and point you camera (use a tripod) at the slide in the projector through the lens opening.
 
Matthew said:
Any suggestions on scanners for that application?
Click to expand...
I found it came down to how many items you want to scan. A friend who archives important records suggested if the amount is 500-1000 items check into a local outfit that digitizes photos, slides, etc. Or if quality is not a primary concern you can take digital pics with a phone/camera and run the results through an app/program to clean any artifacts. Given I had over 2000 items to convert and quality was important, I bought a Canoscan 9900F which came recommended by a local photographer and provided a fairly easy means to digitize everything which afterwards I used a photo editing program to fine tune the scans. However, it seemed a bit hit and miss with some of the slides which was told not all film capable scanners can handle. SO you may want to verify your scanner can do slides well.
 
Bell206 said:
I found it came down to how many items you want to scan. A friend who archives important records suggested if the amount is 500-1000 items check into a local outfit that digitizes photos, slides, etc. Or if quality is not a primary concern you can take digital pics with a phone/camera and run the results through an app/program to clean any artifacts. Given I had over 2000 items to convert and quality was important, I bought a Canoscan 9900F which came recommended by a local photographer and provided a fairly easy means to digitize everything which afterwards I used a photo editing program to fine tune the scans. However, it seemed a bit hit and miss with some of the slides which was told not all film capable scanners can handle. SO you may want to verify your scanner can do slides well.
Click to expand...
We used a local outfit that made DVDs of a lot of old 8mm family movies.
 
Bell206 said:
I found it came down to how many items you want to scan. A friend who archives important records suggested if the amount is 500-1000 items check into a local outfit that digitizes photos, slides, etc. Or if quality is not a primary concern you can take digital pics with a phone/camera and run the results through an app/program to clean any artifacts. Given I had over 2000 items to convert and quality was important, I bought a Canoscan 9900F which came recommended by a local photographer and provided a fairly easy means to digitize everything which afterwards I used a photo editing program to fine tune the scans. However, it seemed a bit hit and miss with some of the slides which was told not all film capable scanners can handle. SO you may want to verify your scanner can do slides well.
Click to expand...

The flatbed scanners I’ve looked at, including your recommendation, have huge DPI numbers for the hi-res a lot of people want. In our case, we’re trying to avoid a flatbed since the one-at-time place and scan gets tedious.

I kind of like the autofeed that something like that Epson provides. But the tradeoff is DPI. I’m thinking that the books and shoeboxes of old b&w snapshots we want to digitize won’t need too much. Our current flatbed could work (has already worked) well for the larger framed portraits and other, similar, photos.

As for slides: Not sure yet on how many boxes we’ll inherit, so a dedicated scanner or 2nd party may be the solution for that.

The goal is to get everything onto USB drives we can distribute to kids, grandkids, and great-grand kids. My MIL was really big into taking pix of as much of her life as possible, starting early, so there’s a lot of family history. My own folks lived in a time when their parents took a fair amount of photos. So we have photos of great-great grandparents working the farm. Some of them are pretty faded by now and I hope to preserve some of them for our own kids.
 
Matthew said:
have huge DPI numbers for the hi-res a lot of people want.
Click to expand...
I was told the high-res dpi was found in film/photo scanners for the highest quality. If looking to simply preserve and share seems the iphone/android route with the proper app installed may be a good route. As mentioned the only issues I had were the 35mm slides but don't k now if the phone apps do any better.
 
I have seen problems with color photos being scanned without a good resolution. Colors tended to not blend (I don’t know the technical term) very well. For example: the sky (darker blue up high and transitioning to a lighter blue at the horizon) shows a gradual shift in film but can show the color shifts if it isn’t scanned properly.
 
I would go the route of a Sony mirrorless A7 series II or higher, macro lens and cheapo light table for the slides. Tape off a wedge on the light table to fixture the slide. Experiment for best manual settings and manual focus. The scan a new slide every 1 second. Shoot in raw+jpeg and you can always re-edit. Ideally shoot tethered to light room or other one from phase One.

Scanning prints is a PITA. I might be easiest to lay 6 on the flatbed scanner and scan all as one mega hi resolution image. Then only come back and extract/crop and edit images of interest.

Spend the time on a quality RAW or TIF images up front. Don't get wrapped around the axle on edits or fixes unless really needed.

I've tried a few batches of 35mm slides and they just never seemed to pop. Medium Format slides or negatives - especially Velvia really look awesome especially scanned with a modern camera to about 80 megapixel or so

Large format negatives beg for a flatbed scanner and easily exceed 300 megapixel:)

Scanning prints will easily reveal the paper structure and more frustrating, each and every scratch and fiber. Thus just scan them and only touch up winners.

I love some of my grandparents simple prints from the 1940's. But the papers are in such tough shape.

Scanning old collections are tedious at best.
 
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