Scanning slides

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I want to scan some Instamatic slides and also some old 35mm slides using my Epson V330 scanner but what dpi should I use? I've been using 600dpi at the moment which is giving around 2.5 MB but is this too big?
 
Depends what you want to use them for. Most dedicated film scanners are (or were) 2500dpi and up. I think the last Nikon Coolscan was 4000dpi.

The thing is you can always throw away resolution after you have scanned, for instance a re size to attach to an e mail, but if you don't have it in the first place you are a bit stuck if you want to do anything other than look at them on a computer screen.

If you are printing you will need at least 150dpi at the print size but preferably 250-300 dpi. A 600dpi scan on 35 mm will only give you 900ish pixels on the long side - a 3 inch wide print??

Also it's surprising what detail you can pick out in a high dpi scan that was often not visible in a 6x4 print.

So I would use the highest un interpolated resolution the scanner will muster, and be prepared for some large files.

HTH

David
 
I would scan at the highest resolution the scanner will go to as Willid1 suggested. The problem is that flatbed scanners do not work so well with the smaller negs/slides so scanning at the highest resolution you should get more detail out.

I am not familiar with the V330's but I would mess with some of the setting to see what you get as scanning can extenuate the grain of the images.

Oh and 2.5Mb is not very big for a scanned image.
 
Instamatic is pretty similar to 35mm in size, though square images from what i remember.
I have a V500, i scan my film at 2400dpi (the max optical res of the scanner) to TIFF files, edit in Lightroom then export to JPG. TIFF files are huge anyway but i'd expect that if i scanned to JPG i'd want them about 8-10MB, same sort of size as a RAW file from a DSLR.

You think 2.5MB is big you should see the size of a medium format 6x9 scanned to TIFF at 2400dpi :)
 
My Optimax slide/neg scanner scans at 7200dpi max, and produces files that are even bigger than my 5D2 produces... I have it set to 3600dpi, which is still large enough for a huge print.

A.
 
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