[MacDV] Re: Film Scanners

[Gregg Gorrie]

on 12/28/02 2:19 PM, Randy Wilson at wilsonr at fonix.com wrote:

> The problem is that while the Epson 2450 is the fastest flatbed scanner I've
> heard of (17 seconds for a 6x4" print at 600dpi, for example), it is still
> painfully slow on transparent scans (3-7 minutes per slide).  The Super
> Coolscan slide scanner is suppsed to be "fast", but still takes about a minute
> per slide (at full resolution, but without any of the additional processing
> that can make it take 10 times that).
> 
> I think I have mentioned here before that I have about 10,000+ slides to scan,
> and I've been trying to figure out if there is any possible way to do this in
> a reasonable amount of time.  I don't necessarily need absolutely optimal
> quality and resolution--just scans that look good on a computer screen (e.g.,
> a screensaver that zooms in on part of the picture), TV screen (e.g., slide
> show video with appropriate music and/or narration), and perhaps a print of up
> to 8x10 inches.  A 4 megapixel image would be sufficient.

> 
> To scan a large collection of slides, there seem to be a few alternatives:
> 1. Use a flatbed scanner.  This is slow (3-8 minutes per slide), and the
> quality may not be as good as a slide scanner.  However, for me it would be
> "free", since I already have the scanner.
> 
> 2. Use a slide scanner.  This is only slightly less slow (1 minute per slide
> with a $1200 firewire scanner; slower on a cheaper or USB scanner).  This
> would probably yield the best quality, if an expensive (>$1000) scanner is
> used.
> 
> 3. Use a miniDV camcorder: Blast through the slides, filming off of a screen
> or transfer box, and extract images from the video.  This would also be "free"
> for me, since I have a camcorder, and would be much faster than the other
> ways: about 2 seconds per slide to shoot the video, and another few seconds
> per slide to save each slide from the video stream (or perhaps done
> automatically).  But the quality would be nasty: 640x480 and highly
> compressed.
> 
> 4. Use a digital camera: Project each slide onto a movie screen or transfer
> box, and use a 4 megapixel digital camera to snap off each picture.  This
> would probably take 3-5 seconds per picture (assuming the digital camera could
> store things off that quickly), and would be high enough resolution for most
> things.  I need to experiment to see how the quality compares with a slide
> scanner.
 
> Is there such a thing anywhere (even for $100,000) as a scanner that will do
> fast high-quality scans of slides?

What your time is worth? A few years ago I spent $600 (CND) on an HP
Photosmart S20 scanner for my Dad with the intent of archiving thousands of
family slides/negs. By the time all was said and done, we were lucky to come
out with maybe 25 scans in a hour (and of course that doesn't include time
to catalog, backup data, etc.). It was totally discouraging, and to be
honest, the quality wasn't that great.

Previously we had sent several hundred slides in to a Kodak Photo CD shop;
awesome quality, no muss, no fuss, and they had 300 slides done in less than
a week. It seemed a little pricey at the time (about $1/slide) which is why
I went the scanner route, but in retrospect I should have saved my money on
the scanner, and countless hours of time, and just had them all done to
Photo CD. 

My advice - take them to a service bureau that does Kodak Photo CD/Picture
CDs and spend your time/money on the creative side of things.

http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professional/products/storage/pcdMaster/about
PCD.jhtml?id=0.3.6.30.17&lc=en



-- 
Gregg