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Scanners for Large Negatives?
Ironsides asks: "My family has a number of old negatives that we would like to digitize. While we could spend the cash and have them all turned into prints and scan the prints, we would prefer to scan the negatives directly. One other problem is that several family members scattered throughout the country also have collections that would need to be scanned in and we could not possibly pay to have them all turned into prints. Now, here's the catch: a sizable number (at least 100 hundred, possibly several hundred) are 1:1 negatives that are 4x5 inches in size (yes, these are very old negatives). Now, I've been looking at slide and negative scanners and unfortunately it seems they only go up to 2.3x3.5 inches (6x9 cm). Does anyone know of a high quality scanner that will handle such large negatives?"
Find your local reprographics/graphic arts service bureau. They'll do this no problems -- there is no better instrument for the job than a drum scanner.
you had me at #!
A friend of mine is a retired photography professor who does a lot of work on a 4x5 view camera. He's using an older Epson flatbed scanner. It has an illuminator on top, and a frame that can hold four 4x5 negatives for gang scanning. It comes with a whole set of frames to hold negatives of various sizes from 35mm to 8x10. His Epson model is discontinued, but it appears the equivalent would be something like the Epson Perfection V750-M.
What does scanning old photographs have to do with DEC?
I don't know if I know my DEC history correctly, but what do scanners have to do with DEC?
Try this (for B&W negs):
- Use a CanoScan 9950f or Epson v750*
- Get a registered copy of VueScan
- Scan at your scanner's max physical resolution for 6x6, and 1/2 max for 4x5
- Set white and blackpoints to 0.
- Scan at 16 bit depth greyscale, 2 samples, no sharpening, no dust correction
- Save as 16 bit Tiff
- Load your images in Cinepaint or Photoshop CS or Elements 4 or later
- Adjust the "Levels" to set your desired black and white points.
- Save this to your archive as a 16 bit tiff.
now, for each desired print or display size:* CanoScan models don't work on Linux; the Epson v750 may with Vuescan (needs libUSB and USB group access).
For the price that most service bureaus are going to charge to scan 'a few hundred' 4x5 negatives, he can afford a pretty nice flatbed scanner and transparency adapter that will almost certainly give this guy the results he needs. Unless these are really nice, professionally taken 4x5s, a drum scanner is just going to be spending most of its resolution investigating the finer points of the film grain. Not really very useful. That much resolution just isn't needed for older photos taken by amateur photographers, and which were meant to be printed out 1:1 onto fiber-based photo paper. If these were original Ansel Adams negatives, I'll take all that back...but if they're grandad's snapshots, 11000 lpi is just a waste of bits.
Actually, for the price that a service bureau would charge, this guy could probably go out and buy a used Imacon Flextight and then sell it at the conclusion of the project. The difference in quality between a good Imacon scan and a drum scan would probably not be worth the cost in this instance.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I spent a lot more time than I had to because I scanned them all at 20MB raw image size (the jpegs averaged roughly 6MB each when I was done.) My intent was to keep good-quality archival copies of the slides. However, these large files meant that every action with them was slow: transferring them from the scanner via USB 1.2 took like 40 seconds per image, loading and saving them in an editor to rotate and crop them was slow, importing them into Arcsoft to produce the slideshow was slow, and so on.
Decide what you intend to do with the digital images first. Are you going to archive them as I did? Then accept that it will be slow. An archival quality scan of the medium format film that you describe will take hundreds of megabytes per image. But if you're just going to burn a DVD for the family and discard the scans as intermediate files, scan them at DVD resolutions and you'll save a ton of time throughout the process.
Invest in some good scanning software. The out-of-the-box stuff I got from Minolta was slower than molasses. It took it 20 seconds to autofocus each slide individually, and that was prior to the scan itself! I purchased Vuescan from Hamrick software and it sped the process considerably. They support many dozens of scanners, film profiles, etc. It automated the process of scanning a full carrier of slides. It was worth every penny to me.
Use a dust brush on each and every negative before scanning it. A cheap squeezy rubber-bulb brush will clean up most dust and hairs nicely, and they're only like $5.00.
Don't bother printing them unless you actually want the prints of the pictures.
Find a good program to help rotate and crop the images, clean up dust specks, and fix colors. I used Paint Shop Pro, and eventually got pretty fast at it. Later, I found RPhoto (freeware! on the web) that enabled me to whip through rotating and cropping at high speeds.
Figure out in advance how you want to organize the images you scan. I built a directory structure by year, and scanned the images in rough chronological order. If there is no organization to your media, be sure to take the time to tag them at some point in the process (probably the time you crop and rotate them.) Names, places and dates are all good searchable data. I used a short description for the file names, but I wish I'd edited the EXIF data when I had the chance.
Regarding medium format film, ask about flatbed scanners at a good photography shop. When I was shopping for newer film scanners, I found an Epson flatbed with a "negative attachment." It consisted of a backlight-box that had a snap-in film carrier on the bottom that would hold 2 five-frame 35mm filmstrips. You could remove the film carrier and use a larger frame to hold your negatives in place (the adjustable carriers that you use in enlargers to hold medium format film comes to mind.)
Once you figure out what you're doing, take a few minutes and write up an instruction sheet. You'll probably go stir-crazy after scanning a thousand frames, and you'll likely want to take a break for a few months. It's nice to come back to full instructions so you can pick up exactly where you left off.
Realize that this will take a lot of your time. Check with a commercial photo house and ask about their scanning rates. I was quoted from about $0.75 per slide to $1.20 per slide. Of course with over three thousand slides to scan I wasn't about to spend that kind of money, but I did spend several hundred on a Minolta Dimage film scanner, and many, many hours scanning. That's where the instruction sheet helped -- my wife picked it up and she started scanning in her free time, too! You might want to consider hiring a photo house to use a drum scanner just for your medium format slides, rather than tackle them yourself. You'll get the best quality scans
John
If you have a lot of 4x5's check out some of the large format photography pages (http://www.largeformatphotography.info/). 4x5 and larger photography is still something that people are activily doing, so they have looked at these issues before. http://www.photo.net/ is also a good place to look
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