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HOME TOPICS ABOUT ME We found that scanning our own slides and negatives takes a lot of time. |
technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 Scanning slides and negatives, Part 1: Good news and badMay 27, 2001 Reader's expert advice on cleaning negatives and slides By Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2001, Al Fasoldt Copyright © 2001, The Syracuse Newspapers We have a lot of 35mm slides. For many years, most of them lived in a drawer in the dressing room, orphaned by a broken slide projector and ignored by the revolution in digital photography. This year, we knew we had to act if we ever wanted to see our slides again: We could buy another slide projector and put up with the low-tech nature of slide projection or we could get a slide scanner and make digital images out of all our slides. It was an easy choice. We chose a slide scanner. This week I'll tell you what we discovered when we jumped into slide scanning, and next week I'll review an impressive slide and negative scanner from Polaroid. I wish I could say we've enjoyed every minute of our life with digitized slides, but I can't. We love the digital images we've produced. We've sent some of them to friends and relatives by e-mail and we've used our inkjet printer to make photo-quality prints out of many of them. I even entered one of those prints in a contest. But we learned a couple of unpleasant lessons in the process. We found out right away that slides and negatives love to attract dust, dirt and old strands of cat hair. We often found that we were scanning more than just our pictures. Dust blobs showed up on many of our images. We had to rescan many of them. This might not seem like a big problem, but it can be disastrous. Because slides and negatives are only an inch or so across, they have to be magnified a huge amount in the scanner. That means every little spec of dust and each fragment of hair will be magnified by the same amount. We spent a lot of money on cans of compressed air to blow away dust from the slides over the months we were scanning our treasured collection of old slides. We even bought extra cans of Dust-Off from the company that makes them, and one time, at a weak moment, I fell for the lure of a fist-size vacuum cleaner that was supposed to double as an air blower. It was a $30 dodo. Mostly, we found that scanning our own slides and negatives takes a lot of time. I spent most of a vacation week doing little more than eating, sleeping and scanning, and still had only a few hundred scans to show for that week's work. During normal weeks, I stole an hour from my sleep time each morning just to get more scanning done. If this sounds like a lot of bad news, relax. I'm simply telling you the whole story. It's easy to forget the work involved when you get excited about being able to turn your slides and negatives into digital images. I'm telling you all this because scanning slides or negatives can soak up a lot of your time. It can also cost you dearly. Prices range from about $500 for basic models that can scan only one slide or negative at a time to more than $2,000 for scanners that can scan many slides or negatives in one pass. The expensive ones usually have many additional features, too. We never even considered using a regular scanner for slides and negatives. Regular scanners (usually called "flatbed scanners") aren't made to scan tiny objects, and they just don't have the resolving power to turn slides and negatives into good-quality digital images. Take my advice and ignore claims from some manufacturers that their regular scanners also can do slides or negatives. Dogs can't talk, pigs can't fly and consumer-level flatbed scanners can't do slides and negatives. Next: Adventures with a Polaroid Sprintscan 4000 slide and negative scanner. |