[DigiCam] Slide scanner or copier?

[ShirleyK]

How good are the slides? How many is a boatload? How good does the scan 
have to be?

For perfectly exposed slides, you can get by with something less 
expensive. If they are in poor shape, you probably want a scanner with 
Digital ICE (you want both color correction and noise control). Also 
research Density - possibly more important than dpi.

You can go with the expensive dedicated film scanner (such as Nikon 
Coolscans, probably the best), a good flatbed with transparancy adapter 
(such as Epson Perfection), or the add-on to a digital camera. I don't 
know how you control lighting with that, however.

I have the Nikon Coolscan 4000 ED which cost $1700 a couple years ago. 
They are still available for $1200-something minus a $200 rebate. 
(That's list from Nikon's site). That one has FireWire. There is a less 
expensive model that uses USB and it also has a $200 rebate. One of the 
Mac magazines reported that the FireWire was no faster than the USB 
when they were reviewed a couple years ago. Recently Nikon announced a 
new series of Coolscans that replace those. They are described as 
"affordable" and they MIGHT be better than the older ones. I saw a 
price of $750 for the one that I think replaces mine. Unfortunately, 
the new ones use USB 2.0 instead of FireWire.

I've done over 4000 slides and over 2000 negatives. The slides were in 
OS 9. The negatives and some new slides I'm doing are in OS X. 
Unfortunately, using their software on OS X, I've hit some problems. 
There will be random 4-pixel bands, side-by-side that are swapped. I 
was able to select each, put them on separate layers and then move them 
back into their correct positions. This mostly fixed the glitch, but 
that is time-consuming and doesn't always put it back together right. 
After downloading Lasersoft's Silverfast scanning software, I convinced 
myself that the problem is not heat-related as tech support said, but 
rather their software. Since I didn't notice this on the earlier slides 
done on OS 9, I think they just have problems adapting to OS X. I also 
didn't notice it with the negatives. I mainly saw it when zoomed in to 
fix red eye. They also have a memory leak and there is no estimated 
time frame to fix it. Again, I believe this is only on OS X (and of 
course, only with Nikon's software).

I needed to scan some larger negatives, so I got the Epson Perfection 
2450. It does a pretty good job and had I never seen the Nikon scans, I 
would have been happy with those. You can scan up to 4 at a time that 
way, but I'd think you'd better have lots and lots of RAM. I don't even 
try that with 750 MB of RAM, while scanning at 2000 dpi.

Then there is disk space. Scanning at 2000 dpi and setting Photoshop to 
NOT save that flattened extra copy of the image, I could only get about 
21 slides on one CD. Storing hundreds of CDs was not attractive, so I 
bought a DVD burner which holds about 7 times that many images.

Since the digital camera attachment is going to be the cheapest route, 
I'd try that first and see if you can live with the results. You 
probably aren't out that much if you decide to get something better. It 
will certainly be the fastest way to capture them too. Using the color 
correction (ROC) and noise control (GEM), scans took about 3 minutes on 
a dual 1.42 G4. On a slower iMac G3 when I started, they took about 6 
minutes. What is the recommended lens for that attachment? (I have the 
Digital Rebel too.)

Shirley (who could just about write a book on this by now)


On Wednesday, December 3, 2003, at 03:36  PM, Ron wrote:

> Anyone have any recommendation for a good slide/film scanner? I prob 
> will
> get one that is in the 4000 dpi range. Would you recommend firewire 
> over
> USB? I am on a Mac running OS 9.1