[MacDV] Re: Film Scanners

[Danny Grizzle]

On 12/30/02 5:20 PM, "David DelMonte" <david at bohtech.com> wrote:

> I also have a few thousand slides I'd like to digitize and catalog. I
> was thinking of the Nikon S4000 with the automatic feeder. I know that
> costs about $2000. However, if I send two thousand slides to a store
> and they cost even $.50 each (I cant find the cents key), that would be
> $1000, and additional slides would cost even more. Perhaps if I bought
> this equipment, I could offer a service for friends to cover my costs.

Sounds like my logic 5 years ago. BTW - I still owe on the credit card,
though I've probably paid for the scanner and auto feeder 3 times, the auto
feeder does not work reliably unattended (there goes any potential time
savings), I've never found time to scan my slide collection & negatives,
I've bought more hard disks than existed worldwide in 1990, and now that I
know what is involved, I could never hope to recoup my investment by taking
on side jobs. Not worth my time, much less overhead. In fact, I've got
teenagers who could use work, but it is not worth the overhead in training
them... I can't imagine them so much as learning to do a professional level
CD label, much less becoming a trained Photoshop dust spotter and color
corrector, performing resolution resampling, making JPEGs, cataloging
images, etc.

To make things worse, my &^%#$@#!@^%&* unemployed brother-in-law has taken
up residence in my office for the past month scanning his deceased
grandfather's slides. A total waste, poor quality results, running up and
down the hall 3 times every hour, calling my cell phone whenever I'm away...
unending tech support. Now that he is used to being around, and considering
himself an expert (fools never have a clue of their own limitations), he is
probing me about getting on the payroll. Actually, I think he is spending
all day sucking up Internet bandwidth in chat rooms with Russian women, or
imitators thereof.

Moral: be careful what you wish for. I'd trade places with you, if I could
have all my money back.

Danny Grizzle