Buying a scanner

Advice

[limbo]

I am looking for a quality 'No Bulls**t' scanner with plenty of muscle

It needs to be able to scan colour negatives and slide film. USB & Windows XP - Looking to stay as near £150 as possible. Will be doing bulky scanning jobs of a catalougue of thousands of negs and slides.

No need for combi, fax, copier, software etc.

Any recommendations or 'steer clears'?

Ta

Limbo

[HarryM]

I bought an Epson 2450 Photo flatbed scanner a few years ago. It does a good job of scanning four slides at a time, and connects via USB or Firewire. It also does film. I access it directly from Photoshop.

However at four slides a time it will still take a long time to get through thousands.

It was the most useful domestic scanner for slides at the time, although things will have moved on now.

[limbo]

Thanks for the recommendation.

I will be scanning thousands of slides, but over the next 2-3 years - not batch processing. So a desktop like that is what I am seeking. But it needs to be robust for plenty of use.

Ta

Limbo

[wavebird23]

Search Dell's website. It has many scanners that match your needs.

[piskie]

I bought an "Epson Perfection 3200 Photo" for just this reason.
It will scan 35mm 6cm sq and 5"x4" neg or pos as well as normal reflective scans.
It does its job very very well and I would buy it again tomorrow.
I believe there may be a facelift model now but it is essentialy the same.
There is a comprehensive review at photo-i.com

[Jon_King]

I have the Epson 3200 and I am extremly pleased with it. The speed is good, the transparency quality is great and it never crashes my system.

[Macguru]

The CanoScan 9900F Color Image Scanner
3200 x 6400 dpi 48-bit depth
FireWire® or USB 2.0 up to 400/480 Mbps
photos, transparencies or negatives 35mm, medium-format or 4" x 5", 8.5" x 11"
35mm film adapter and 8 mounted slides adapter

Perfect for a graphic designer with occasional need for tranparencies.
It's almost an high end professional scanner. My GF has one and she very satisfied with it. First thing she did with it was to scan the cat! ;)

About £220

[HarryM]

As I said in an earlier post, I bought my Epson 2450 a few years ago so things will probably have changed. But at the time the 2450 was the only scanner that could scan 4 slides at a time semi-automatically. I have scanned about 1400 slides with it with no problems.

It has a plastic former which locates the slides, does an automatic preview of all 4 slides at once, and if you are satisfied with the thumbnails produced you just have to click scan to produce the 4 images. In my case straight into Photoshop, but it's just as easy to download them to disk.

At that time all the others I looked at - including very reputable brands - only previewed 1 slide at a time.

I'm sure things have moved on now, but it's worth checking how easy a scanner is to actually use. I think the usability of a scanner is at least as important as the claimed resolution - I have never needed to use the 2450 at its max res.