[DigiCam] Re: Slide scanner or copier?

[Ron]

Thanks Shirley for all the great info. I prefer to not get a flatbed. I have
an Epson and did not like the results the one time I tried it. I do like it
for scanning photos though. I don't have near as many as you do to scan at
this time, but if it goes good, I have more slides and hundreds if not
thousands of negatives from years ago, but I am pretty particular and want
the best or darn near the best. I have been looking at Nikon 8000ED with a
$500 rebate right now, Minolta, Canoscan, and PrimeFilm. Prices range from
$1850 to less than $600 and yes, I definately want the ICE software. And I
already have a DVD burner and it is great for backing up. I prefer not to
spend more than $1000. I may go ahead and try one of the lens attachments on
the Digital Rebel. My quick search didn't tell which lens it recommended,
but I think I recall that it wanted something in the medium portrait focal
length-around 75 to 120mm-so I guess that one would have to multiply that by
1.6. I got the 55 to 200 AFS lens with the camera in addition to the 18-55,
so I should be covered.

Take care!
Ron--
> 
> 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
> 
> 
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