Bulk digitising of old prints

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phil
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Not sure this is the correct place to post but... have a lot of old prints that I want digitised and looking for suggestions of companies people have had a good experience with.
Any help appreciated.

Phil
 
IMHO all the decent companies are very expensive, all the cheap ones are rubbish.
You’ll get the best results for the least expense by buying a scanner and doing it yourself.

We did all our old photos, some negs and my wife’s grandads slides.
 
Good post, I was thinking along the same lines as doing a load of old photos we have.

I really would not know what kind of scanner would do if I were to do it myself.
 
I really would not know what kind of scanner would do if I were to do it myself.
Any half decent flat bed scanner will give better results than the ‘copying machine’ in Max Spielman’s. Purely because it’s being driven by someone who cares about the results.

We bought one with a neg/slide carrier, the hardest part was finding a worthy cause to donate the scanner to once we’d finished.
 
I really would not know what kind of scanner would do if I were to do it myself.

As Phil says, any decent scanner will do for photos. If you intend to do negatives/transparencies though, a scanner that has a backlight is useful.

The Epson V500 / 550 / 600 range are all good choices for this, and whilst the 600 is expensive new, you could probably shop around for a decent V500/550 2nd hand on eBay. Or have a nose into the Film classifieds here.

The Epson V39 would probably do if you just want to scan photos, although there are likely cheaper options.

You have the initial setup learning curve, but once you've done one, the rest will all scan quite quickly and you can watch Netflix/YouTube in the background while it's chugging away.
 
If "a lot" is over a couple of hundred, I'd probably go for one of the auto feeding scanners. Getting them done commercially will be expensive.
 
I had around a 1000 old photos to scan.
I decided buy the Nikon ES-2 to help with digitising them.
It's not the quickest, takes me about 15 minutes to photograph a set of 36 film. About an hour to photograph and process a 100.
I spend an hour doing that every other weekend. It'll probably take me about half a year to get though them slowly but I'm not in any hurry and i have been mostly stuck at home thanks to the pandemic.
Most importantly I have RAW files for all of them with great quality.
 
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I've used a much rougher approach, I've just photographed them. The results are good enough (for me) to print out and frame.
 
Thanks for replies -very useful. I see you can hire the Epson bulk scanner. May go down that route - unless?
 
I recently scanned several decades of prints through a regular printer/flatbed scanner - it took a few days - but I had the time - and the results are great. There are machines that can auto scan - but I'm not sure how well they cope with lots of different sized prints. Mine weren't all 6x4's - I had all shapes and sizes over the years.
 
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