Film Scanners (slide feeders)

[Randy Wilson]

It's too bad the slide feeder for the Nikon seems to have so much
trouble.  I have a 1957 "Kodak 300" slide projector that has a great
feeder.  You slap 80 or so slides into the front side, and you can rifle
through slides every second or two if needed.  I have run about 10,000
slides through it in the last couple of months and have had only about 5
slides get stuck in it.  Maybe Nikon should look at some 1957 technology
and see how it was done?

[Incidentally, I can't imagine having to use carousels for my slide
collection.  Dropping each slide into its own slot would take a long
time.  Storing slides in carousels would take up tremendous room, too. 
I currently store about 900 slides in a box the length and width of a
sheet of legal sized paper, so I can store about 3500 slides in a single
"banker's box".  Then I pull out 50-80 at a time and drop them into the
slide projector, look at them, and then put them back into the box. 
Very fast and compact.]

I was just talking to someone else who also wants to digitize his
slides and negatives.  We agreed that one of the main solutions is going
to involve a 2-dimensional CCD.  Otherwise, the higher the resolution,
the more scans per inch have to be done, and thus the slower things will
be.  With a good high resolution 2-D CCD, it should be possible to do
one scan (or perhaps 3 if separate snapshots are taken for red, green
and blue) instead of having to do over 5000 individual scan lines
separately.  That could speed the scanning part up by over 1000 times,
potentially (i.e., instead of 14 minutes for a full-blown super-sampled
scan, it could be done in .84 seconds).  Couple that with a slide feeder
as good as the 1957 model, and you could scan seriously fast.

Some might scoff, but this is in fact already possible in a rudimentary
way, by using my old projector, a projection box, and a 4+ megapixel
digital camera.  If I can do that, then Nikon or someone ought to be
able to build something better that is actually designed for this
purpose in order to improve the quality.

I agree with what others have said, though, that scanning is only part
of the problem: Figuring out where to store images, how to annotate
them, catalog them, index, and search them are also big questions, as
well as the often overlooked question: How to actually look at them
(e.g., slide show on the computer with music; screen savers; slide shows
on video or DVD; printing out in books or albums to go on the coffee
table; buring to CD with html pages to share with family; etc.).  Of
course, we often don't know what these photos will eventually be used
for (a video for somebody's 100th birthday celebration or 50th wedding
anniversary in 20 years, for example), which is why we often archive
photos at higher quality than we need for our currently-envisioned
projects.