Photo Scanner

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gre

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Name
Guy
Edit My Images
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Hi all,

Apologies if this has already been hammered to death, but I'm new to forums in general and would apprecaite some help.

I have lots and lots of photo albums at home, which contain thousands of pictures of my youth and growing up, and the same with my parents, family, friends etc..

I wish to digitalise each picture and am looking for an affordable phot scanner that I can simply place a photo into, press a button and scan / upload. The device I seek does not need facility to print. I popped into Jessops by my office at lunch today and my requirements seemed lost on the sales assistant who was not interested in understanding what I wanted, but in telling me about their serivce where they can scan the photos in for me - I don't want this.

Any help / advice very greatfully received.

Thanks, Guy
 
I usually recommend starting at an Epson V750, then moving down the (Epson) numbers until you get to one you can justify the cost of.
 
gre said:
Apologies if this has already been hammered to death, but I'm new to forums in general and would apprecaite some help.

I have lots and lots of photo albums at home, which contain thousands of pictures of my youth and growing up, and the same with my parents, family, friends etc..

I wish to digitalise each picture and am looking for an affordable phot scanner that I can simply place a photo into, press a button and scan / upload. The device I seek does not need facility to print. I popped into Jessops by my office at lunch today and my requirements seemed lost on the sales assistant who was not interested in understanding what I wanted, but in telling me about their serivce where they can scan the photos in for me - I don't want this.
Click to expand...

As mentioned there are various threads around here about scanning. Many of the threads will be about scanning from negatives or transparencies however, and I get the impression you want to do it from prints. I started out that way; it was enough to get me interested, but I didn't like the quality of the results, so I, too, went down the negative/transparency route.

For prints, I guess any decent quality flatbed scanner will do you a reasonable job, within the limits of capability. Remember, you've already had some compromises going from negative to print, now you're adding a second set of compromises going from print to digital (nothing's perfect). However, the approach does have two things going for it: first, you've already done a selection process in printing images and putting them into albums (and may even have good sequence and other incidental information from the album pages that will help you make sense of the resulting mass of images), and second, you won't have to worry about the difficult problems of colour casts in negatives. Of course, you maybe will have to worry about variable colour casts from aging prints, not to mention damage from life in the album.

Here's an image from 1970 that I scanned first from a print, and later from the negative:

Ginetta_3.jpg


CN70A105a.jpg


Even at this low resolution, you can probably see the difference!

When I started, I found this site helpful (though it's about slides rather than prints) http://www.andromeda.com/people/ddyer/photo/slide-transfer.html.

In the end I bought a dedicated film scanner. If I'd been on TP at that stage, I might well have chosen something else. Epson V500 etc seem popular.
 
Chris - I find your second scan a bit too blue ?

Guy - another alternative, depending on quality you want, is a digital camera, and just take a photo of the photo.

Quality / price of the digi camera will determine the results.

Or, of you already have one, give it a try.
 
Tricky69 said:
Chris - I find your second scan a bit too blue?
Click to expand...

I'm not surprised; it was one of the first colour negative films I scanned, and I certainly wasn't familiar with the SilverFast controls. Also today's NegaFix presets don't seem to represent the film from that era. I'd have to search out the packet to know what film type it was (later I tried to remember to put the film type in the folder name).

I might also have been over-compensating, trying to get that lovely little Ginetta G15 to be the rich blue I remember!

I think it does show up the ageing colour cast in the print, though!
 
ChrisR said:
I think it does show up the ageing colour cast in the print, though!
Click to expand...

yes, but there is also a nice warm nostalgic feeling to the original :)
 
Tricky69 said:
yes, but there is also a nice warm nostalgic feeling to the original :)
Click to expand...

Went back to the negative, which was Kodacolor X. I tried it in the scanner, and there isn't a profile for that film. I don't remember which one I used, but I couldn't find one that does any better than the version I've scanned already. Sometimes I find the Ferrania profiles work better on old Kodak negatives, but not this time!
 
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