First try the F&C section, that's where you get ore filmies with more specialist know-how of this stuff.
Next.. how many negs do you have to scan?
What film-formats are they in?
How much time do you have to chuck at this little project?
It is NOT a fast job, regardless of how quick the scanner may be... especially if negs need restoring, where muggering about in photo-shop will eat as much time as you let it.
I have been slowly and I mean very slowly working through my back archive of 35mm... for at least five years at last attempt... I have had a dedicated film scanner since Y2K, but the resolution and file sizes it chucks out rather overwhelmed Pentium II class PC's of ts own purchase era!!!
A strip of four negs, takes maybe 40 miutes to scan at a high 10Mpix resolution, but I am using 12x 'ish' over scanning to maximize scan quality. If I dropped the scan resolution and quality settings, I might get the machine to do four frames in five minutes or so... B-U-T....
When you add the time to load the strips, and more still to clean them for scanning, and try and keep them in some sort of order, the difference is sort of becoming less significant, and if you are going to that bother, you may as well get the best you can from it
.
And that is before you start muggering about in Photo-Shop trying to remove scratches and dust mots or water damage, adjust out faded colours or correct the exposure errors that they used to at Boots when making a print!
In that scheme, digitsing an old archive becomes a very very big job indeed, and what scanner, is almost an irrelevance in the overall equation....
Takes time to learn the gear and the how to get the best from whatever it may be, and that's where you will most often loose quality, in that know how, whilst the organisation will be the begger of time, when you start re-scanning negs you have done, or missing rafts of them that you haven't etc.... as said, long before you start trying to 'restore' images that probably weren't the best to begin with.. A-N-D, has to be said, as far as the hardware goes, having the RAM to handle larger file sizes, and the Hard-Drive space to store them once you have them, is as important as how 'good' the scanner may be, or how good you hope to make the digi-pics....
Just as a peg in the ball-park, I use an older dedicated 35mm film scanner, as said, maybe 10 minutes a frame actual HQ scan time, but making a concerted effort to get the archive into the digi-domain, I managed to get just about 2000 frames digtised last year... evenings and week-ends, and then STOPPED, before the hard drive got full, so I had a chance to start working through them restoring them and making decent display files!!! I'm still working on that bit!... and it gets depressing when I look at the other three negative binders I have to work through when I have got through the other half of this one! Let aloe the boxes of loose negs, or the carrier bags of boots slips, handed me by relatives clearing out houses when elderly have gone in a home!
Shaking head, remembering how these old photos were looked at in their own day, printed maybe 4x5" max, not on a screen over 8x10", usually hidden behind ribbed cellophane in an album, or covered in sticky finger prints in a Boots envelope, you have to ponder just how LOW an IQ you can really accept or am for... but then you are back to hapeth of tar reasoning, in that you still use so much time loading, sorting and organising the negs, regardless of what scan res you set.....
And farming out a batch to a 3rd party, suddenly looks a very attractive and not so exorbitant ways about the job, when you realize how many man-hours you have wasted to actually NOT make a huge impact on the pile....
Like I said at the top.. how many, what formats, how good do you really need or want them, and how much time and or money have you got to chuck at the job..... and learning how to do it.. in that equation the hardware is far from the most important variable in the sums.
