Forum Moderators: not2easy
i don't have much experience in this area and i'm not sure if i should send them out to a bureau (cost about AU$3.50 each) or hire/buy a scanner (around $AU1,500) and get a student in to scan them for me.
could anyone tell me whether it is possible to get really good scans from 35mm slides using anything other than a drum scanner? i'm looking at a Canon FS4000U which claims to be able to do great slides but several people have told me that i should send them out as drum scanning is the best option.
ta
jane
First, JungleJane said that she could get drum scans for about $3.50 per scan. I think this is someone is putting a consumer scanner on a drum (! ;) ) - a professional drum scan was about $25/image for medium quality in NZ a coupla years ago, (someone else said about 10 pounds) and I really doubt you can get a high quality scan for a fraction of that.
Also I'd doubt that you can get a professional (ie saleable to glossy magazines) scan from a consumer scanner, as some people have said here. I worked in a printery a few years ago, and scanning is only partially getting the scan from the neg/trannie into the computer. If you do it yourself you'll need to use some canned air to make the slides dust-free before the scan, then color-correct and touch up for any dust/artifacts after the scan. Scanning more than a few properly tends to be .. painful.
If the work is to be published in a glossy magazine, your best advice is to contact someone producing one (a printing company, or a glossy magazine or publishing house) and ask them what they need. I bet you the printer will say they need a drum (ie expensive) scan for anything big (>half page).
Now for some alternatives: Kodak PhotoCD and Fuji Frontier machine scans.
I suspect you might actually be thinking of PhotoCD because of that $3.50 price. I believe they use a drum scanner in a dust-sealed room, but it's pretty automated (nobody sitting there doing color correction etc like on pricey drum scans). However the plus side is that it's a bunch cheaper, and faster too. You get 100 images per CD, in a proprietary format (there's a plugin for Photoshop), plus printed thumbnails. The quality is pretty good for the price, and you could prolly use this for a half-page or maybe even a full page print. There's also PhotoCD Pro, which can do larger trannies, is a higher rez and more expensive. Neg (reversal film) scans tend to be pretty iffy tho (its much harder to scan negs than slides). Fuji makes a minilab machine series called Frontier, which offers equivalent scans via a flatbed and gives you jpeg files (more convenient than the Kodak format). there are a bunch of quality options, and they're meant to be pretty good for negs too, but my experiences haven't been so good (mainly because the places hadn't read the manual i guess-sigh). However if you can find a good lab this would be worth checking out in comparison.
Making a PhotoCD/Frontier image library would be a great way to quickly get digitized(/archived) photos of reasonable quality made, without killing your client financially. Then as super-high rez images are requested you can get these done via a drum scanner individually and add them to your collection. I doubt you'd make drum scans available over the web anyhow (even a 6MB PhotoCD scan is basically only downloadable by broadband-havin' clients).
Sorry for not providing any specs - don't have em with me. If you have q's email me or add in a comment.
hope it helped!
peace - boblet
Of course, one of Jane's objectives is archival preservation - if someone needs a pic twenty years down the road, it might be too late for that super scan (which will probably be incredibly cheap by then!).
I'll throw out another option - go with the photo CD scan for the entire collection, but select a smaller quantity (100?) of the best and most unique images for the full drum-scan, no-dust, etc. treatment right away. That way, if the slides are damaged or deteriorate in any way, you have usable digital copies of everything and serious reproduction grade copies of the best images.
btw a link to photo.net's Phillip Greenspun who has an old but good article on PhotoCDs [philip.greenspun.com] (among other things).
peace - boblet
i had interest from several bureaus and selected 2 in Sydney and one small bureau in a tiny town 50km inland from sydney. i took slides in and asked them to provide me with samples of their work. i asked for v. high res tiffs.
bureau one scanned in 3 arbitary slides, high res tiffs, charged me $75 (including one PC copy). the images that came back were really good. brilliant in fact.
bureau two charged me $78 for 10 scans. i think there were 10 - i can't actually view them because it appears that the disc was created for a Mac and i have a PC:-)
the one horse town guy took me out to lunch (love a perk) quizzed me thoroughly on the background and situation and what i was going to do with the images. he then went back to the office and scanned in all 50 images in high res tiff. he then created a database and a fledgling image library (i would need to buy the software for $99 if i go ahead) with search and thumbnails. he also re-numbered the scans to cross reference with the database. the quality was very good. he suggested i buy a nice fat hard drive or firewire and also backed up everything periodically on DVD and stored them somewhere safe. he also offered to batch convert into anything i want - high res jpg and thumbnails were his suggestion. he charges an extra $25 to burn onto DVD and offered to do keywords for $1 per slide.
all for $3.50 a scan up to 1000 and after that $2.20 per scan. the down side is the travelling i would have to do every time i wanted scans done. the quality wasn't as good as the $25 scans but actually far better than i could have done myself and definitely good enough for full page magazine or magazine cover.
i don't have time to do all the scanning myself at this stage and find it quite boring. buying a good film scanner might be a good option for the future but to do the initial scanning for both an archive and for use on a website is a massive pain and i'd love to the pass the buck even if it costs me money!
big decision though and i am still a bit nervous about my final decision - i would HATE to have 1000 scans done and find out later that they aren't good enough. i have sent some of the samples to a friend who is a picture editor and am waiting for her feedback...hopefully my tiny town guy will pass the test!
Boblet i hadn't heard of PhotoCD and have been researching it since i read your excellent post. that's thrown a cat among the pigeons - looks like a very good solution for me...pretty much the same as the service Tiny Town Guy is offering me! price is good too.
this whole topic is not nearly as cut and dried as i thought it would be - but it's possibly going to make or break my whole venture so i have also bought a couple of books on the topic (scanning) and now i am even having scanning nightmares and waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night!
j.
It's also quite slow, I wouldn't want to scan 1000 slides into that thing!
how long does it take to scan an 8 x 10 600dpi slide? and is the software on it any good?
ta heaps
jane
