Film scanners

[bmattock]

If you have color neg processed at a US minilab you can often get processing with CD and mini "contact sheet," no prints, for $5.00. Those scans are decent for 8X10. Compare to the cost of slide processing.

Yucko. Have the lab scan your negs if you enjoy getting them back in totally unscannable condition forever after - as if a cat had been loving and attentive to your eumulsion while you weren't looking.

The drawback to scanning slide film is that embedded dirt isn't removed by Ice, and I think that's more of a problem with E6 than with C41.

I have heard some say that they prefer the plastic mounts over the cardboard mounts. Not much experience myself, so cannot say. Most slides I have scanned have been exceptionally dirt free, and I have no Digital ICE.

The only company that makes a decent film-only scanner currently is Nikon IMO. The older Minolta 5400 was good, though incredibly slow. The new version is trouble, although those that actually function may be better than the older model and probably as good as Nikon V...my own tests suggested that.

Everyone has their own levels of 'acceptability'. I find the SD IV quite acceptable.

The difference between Ice and no Ice is that with Ice you hardly ever deal with spots, and without it you spend a lot of time on each frame, whether or not you think your film is clean.

Two bucks. That's all it costs to run a simple experiment. Take your next roll of C41 to the one-hour place and ask for negatives only, cut and sleeved. No prints, no scans. MUCH cleaner - and CHEAPER. How is this bad?

I'm slowly winning converts, but you would not believe how many people have told me I'm wrong about this. Whatever, works for me.

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks

 

[bmattock]

Process-only on color neg film is not only available almost everywhere, it's very cheap -- less expensive than processing on slide film. And it's been demonstrated that a color neg contains more tonal information than a slide because of its longer density range.
[snip]

I agree 100%!

I would add that learning to do your own B&W (note to newbs - you don't need a darkroom and it's cheap and fun) gets you even better scans. Not because B&W scans better (it doesn't), but because it is invariably CLEANER than anything you get done anywhere else. Take care with your B&W scans and you can print poster-sized and really test your lens out.

I love my 6mp digital SLR, but when I have a really nice deep 3200 dpi scan of a clean properly-exposed and developed B&W negative with my Canon LTM 50mm f1.4 at about f5.6 or f8, I can enlarge in The Gimp to 200%, 400%, and I'm still pulling out detail - the lens is schweet - no digital can do THAT yet. I love both - but a good B&W scan will make you see God. A little churchin' up, right there on your computer screen.

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks

 

[Kat]

I think I'm leaning towards the KM Dual IV and the Epson 3170 from all the suggestions and reviews I found around. I'd love a "top of the line" Nikon or even the KM 5400, but budget is tight, and I don't shoot that many rolls for the cost to be worth it. I figure I'll be saving $2 bucks per roll, so I'd need to shoot 50 rolls to "break even" for every $100 I put down in a scanner.🙂

I just found out the lab I go to which scanned my first roll has only 1840 x 1232, 72 dpi scanning, and the pics came out really grainy. So I guess I don't have to get the best scanner out there to beat that!

On a side note: since dust is now a major concern, how/where do you all store your negatives?

 

[dmr]

On a side note: since dust is now a major concern, how/where do you all store your negatives?

The one Indie lab here returns negatives in a nice plastic sleeve. I fold them up and keep them in that.

Walgreens just returns them in the standard photo envelope, and yes {blush} I tend to just keep them in that.

I've found that the most effective thing is to gently blow off both sides of the negatives/slides with canned air just after putting them in the scanner carriers.

The "auto dust brush" in the Minolta software works, sortakinda. It helps on the color negatives that may have a small speck or two, but is useless on 30 year old slides that have some stuck-on specks and stuff.

 

[etrevino]

I have a Nikon CoolScan 4000 ED at work and I'm very happy with the quality of the scans. It does 120 meg scans at 4000dpi and has Digital ICE. I've used ICE on a few faded, dirty, older-than-me slides from the 1960s and 1970s and it does wonders. I also think ICE is well worth the extra money and if you doubt the authenticity of the sample images at the ICE website, well... those sure are for real. I projected the scanned and ICEd images with a LCD projector and I felt like I was projecting the slide in 1975 with all its unfaded colors.

Yes, ICE slows the process a bit, but it's a lot faster than fixing the image by hand in Photoshop and adjusting curves and so on.

It has a film strip adapter that accepts cut negative strips and it's very handy because other scanners require that you put the strip in a holder (sometimes it's not so easy or fast to do this correctly) and feed the holder into the scanner. With the Nikon film strip adapter the strip is fed by hand directly into it and voila, there it goes.

There's also a very expensive but very nice automatic slide feeder that accepts up to 50 mounted slides so you can put them into the feeder, select the resolution, color, ICE etc. settings, click "start" and leave the thing running. Go have lunch or get some sleep and when you return your 50 scans will be there. It doesn't matter if you put in plastic or cardboard mounts, as long as they're not bent or otherwise damaged, and they're not too thick, they'll work fine. You may later feed these slides one by one.

I can't comment on the uncut strip feeder since I don't have it but I guess it works like the slide feeder. If so, it will be a real time saver too.

I've found the Nikon Scan software very friendly, I don't use any color-correction tools with it (I do that in Photoshop) but so far have not had any problem with it. The software will show you the options that are available according to the adapter that is installed in the scanner (slide feeder, strip feeder, single-slide, APS...) It seemed very intuitive and straightforward to me.

As you may imagine I do recommend it a lot!

Eduardo

 

[Kevin]

I have a Nikon CoolScan 4000 ED at work and I'm very happy with the quality of the scans.

As you may imagine I do recommend it a lot!

Eduardo

Muchas Gracias!

 

[JoeFriday]

same with me, dmr! and I'm surprised they don't have my phone number memorized yet (the way the library staff all recognize me whenever I walk in, and pull out my reserved materials)

 

[Nikon Bob]

For some time now I have been having my negs developed only and get a CD with it. The negs seem no worse for wear by having the scan done and scan well at home in my Minolta 5400. Perhaps I have just been lucky in that regard. I am also lucky in that I pay $3.44 CAD taxes in for this service. This I think is much cheaper than slide processing. The quality of service varies so greatly that develope only might be a safer bet.

Bob

 

[bmattock]

For some time now I have been having my negs developed only and get a CD with it. The negs seem no worse for wear by having the scan done and scan well at home in my Minolta 5400. Perhaps I have just been lucky in that regard. I am also lucky in that I pay $3.44 CAD taxes in for this service. This I think is much cheaper than slide processing. The quality of service varies so greatly that develope only might be a safer bet.

Bob

Glad to hear it has worked for you to have scans done. In my local one-hour shops (as well as two of the pro shops I used to be able to visit), the scanner was also their processing/printing machine - so the film went through the same series of sprockets and whatnot that they do when being enlarged/printed - rather than just processed.

It may also depend on what people find acceptable. I have since found that big horrible scratches print almost invisibly at 4x6, and most people apparently have terrible eyes and don't see them when they're printed out. I always look at my scans at 1:1 and when I see junk in there, I clean it up. I hate cleaning it up.

But I may be wasting my time if I'm only going to print at 4x6.

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks

 

[dmr]

For some time now I have been having my negs developed only and get a CD with it. The negs seem no worse for wear by having the scan done and scan well at home in my Minolta 5400. Perhaps I have just been lucky in that regard.

The way I understand it, when the film is processed by the newer Fuji Frontier minilabs, the ones that Wally World and countless others use, they are scanned for printing -- the 4x6 prints being done on photo paper but from a digital image -- and the CD is just created from those same digital images. In other words, it's my impression that the film handling is the same for a normal develop-print as it is for a DO/CD.

Am I correct on this?

 

[Nikon Bob]

I guess I just have bad eyes or low expectations (maybe both). I do not use the CD for anything other than previewing and the price is the same with or without, so. It may also be that the mini lab I use processes and scans in one operation and then prints digitally. I will ask next time. If there are any uglies on the neg ICE takes care of 99% of them on scanning, nothing is perfect. This mini lab is also the only one that has given acceptable prints (they forgot not to) from XP2. It really was a surprise as the local pro lab usually screwed them up. As I said I think I just lucked out after hearing all the complaints here about processing and scanning of negs and I have experienced it myself.

Bob

 

[bmattock]

I guess I just have bad eyes or low expectations (maybe both). I do not use the CD for anything other than previewing and the price is the same with or without, so. It may also be that the mini lab I use processes and scans in one operation and then prints digitally. I will ask next time. If there are any uglies on the neg ICE takes care of 99% of them on scanning, nothing is perfect. This mini lab is also the only one that has given acceptable prints (they forgot not to) from XP2. It really was a surprise as the local pro lab usually screwed them up. As I said I think I just lucked out after hearing all the complaints here about processing and scanning of negs and I have experienced it myself.

Bob

Bob,

Sorry, I'm not implying that your eyes are bad or that your expectations are low. When I first got back into photography for the first time since high school, I asked a lot of people about scanning and whom should I go to and etc. They all had advice. Lots of advice. I tried all the places they suggested - they were all uniformly awful. And as I said, I'm not a perfectionist. I don't understand why they have such high opinions of such utter crud.

Every time I complained someone would pipe up and say "Oh, that would never happen at MY [insert name of foo-foo pro lab], try them!" And I would, and they would be every bit as bad as the first. I've paid anywhere from $2 to $50 per roll of C41 film for processing and printing, with and without scans - never saw a SINGLE ONE that wasn't all scratched up. To the point where if someone tells me they have their negs printed and scanned and never get scratches - I have trouble believing it. So I figure since they're not lying to me - we must have different sets of expectations.

I'd give up and give in - but my own B&W negs are pretty much without scratches if I take care when I process them - so it MUST be possible to do, right?

When I hit on the combination of not having prints or scans made, it turned out not to matter - both pro and one-hour places did a GREAT job comparatively. I've been trying to spread the word since then, but either no one cares, or they think I'm mistaken.

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks

 

[GeneW]

When I hit on the combination of not having prints or scans made, it turned out not to matter - both pro and one-hour places did a GREAT job comparatively. I've been trying to spread the word since then, but either no one cares, or they think I'm mistaken.

Bill, I've been doing the same with col negs for some time -- develop only, no prints or scans, film uncut. I get less abused negatives this way. I only shave off a dollar or two from the price of getting development AND prints, but the prints are so bad I don't find any benefit to getting them.

My percentage of col film to b&w film is low so I don't mind scanning the entire roll and creating my own contact sheet using Photoshop. Yeah, it really gets me how much the negs get messed up if I get prints made at the same time. I have a cartoon picture in my head of someone in the lab at the print machine drooling on, then stepping on, the negatives ...

Gene

 

[djon]

In my experience (only a dozen recent process-scan-only rolls, three minilabs) I've had no scratches at all. These labs used Fuji and Noritsu equipment.

Pre-digital wisdom: If the lab looks crappy, it is crappy. If the clerk can't pronounce "emulsion", flee: s/he can't have learned to properly operate the equipment.

IMO its silly to use a lab for C41 processing-only as it is virtually as easy to run as B&W. The beauty of minilabs is the scanning, which may not be good enough for enlargement purposes but certainly works well for paperless proofing on your monitor. One hour, $5.

One reason I use color negative / minilab processing rather than E6 is that slides are more vulnurable to dirty chems, seemingly more typical of small E6 labs, than C41 minilabs. Ice doesn't fix dirt in emulsions and that's a real issue with small E6 labs.
Not only have I had scratch-free C41 with current (surviving) minilabs (yes they were terrible a couple of years ago), I've had very clean film.

 

[Nikon Bob]

djon

The mini lab that I am happy with just opened and is using Noritsu equipment and that could be the difference. It is still hit and miss to find such a lab. Yup, the supplied CD is only good for paperless proofing. You pays yer money and you takes yer chances. I too have had develope only do not cut come back rolled up in the canister, just about freaked on the operator. I hate stupidity.

Bob

 

[bmattock]

IMO its silly to use a lab for C41 processing-only as it is virtually as easy to run as B&W.

'Virtually' in this case meaning "not as easy as," right?

I'm looking at the processing instructions and temperatures for the Arista kit - not even in the same class as simple D-76. Yes, it looks like I could maybe do it. No real desire to do so.

The beauty of minilabs is the scanning, which may not be good enough for enlargement purposes but certainly works well for paperless proofing on your monitor. One hour, $5.

Begging your pardon, but that doesn't make any sense. The 'scanning' is low-rez at best. Since I have a scanner, I can do a low-rez scan at a rapid clip, if all I want is something to look at. Some of the Photo CD's I have received in the past have had photos upside down, sideways, and with flopped negs.

If I were to do rapid 'proof' scanning with my scanner, I could then easily do a real scan of the ones I liked. As it is, I just scan it all - I have the hard drive space.

One reason I use color negative / minilab processing rather than E6 is that slides are more vulnurable to dirty chems, seemingly more typical of small E6 labs, than C41 minilabs. Ice doesn't fix dirt in emulsions and that's a real issue with small E6 labs.

Don't quite understand. First you were saying you do your own C41, then saying you don't?

Not only have I had scratch-free C41 with current (surviving) minilabs (yes they were terrible a couple of years ago), I've had very clean film.

Well again, all I can repeat is my experiences. I've had a boat load of people tell me the same thing. Then I go and use their lab, the one they claim never scratches their negs, and all I ever get is scratched up negs. So what does that mean? One thing for sure - I no longer believe that people have 'scratch-free' negs when they get printing and/or scanning done at a one-hour or pro lab. I don't personally believe it is possible.

You may have different results - I can't explain that. All I can say is if *I* use your lab, I'll have scratched negs, and I have way too much experience trying it to believe otherwise.

The funny thing to me - I have gone and tried all the labs that this person or that person tells me never scratches their negs. I disagree with their claims, but at least I tried in good faith. I suggest having negs processed without scanning or printing as a way to reduce scratches - and I get this flat-out refusal to believe it is possible. How hard is it to try? But no, everyone's pet lab is perfect.

I say fine, believe what you want. Your negs are scratch-free. OK with me.

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks

 

[bmattock]

djon

The mini lab that I am happy with just opened and is using Noritsu equipment and that could be the difference. It is still hit and miss to find such a lab. Yup, the supplied CD is only good for paperless proofing. You pays yer money and you takes yer chances. I too have had develope only do not cut come back rolled up in the canister, just about freaked on the operator. I hate stupidity.

Bob

Yeah, I got that recently at the one-hour place where I had carefully trained the operators to do what I want. PROCESS. CUT. SLEEVE. Now, write that down. Repeat. Good.

I got my July 4th negs back rolled in a tight little ball. I asked the operator - what does THIS mean (pointing to the instructions that say PROCESS. CUT. SLEEVE)? He shrugged - "I dunno." Oh, dear God. Three words? He can't understand three words?

Yes, I blew up on him and his manager, and the district manager of the chain. All they did was to make sure he calls someone else to the counter when I walk in. Whatever.

Best Regards,

Bill Mattocks

 

[dmr]

It is still hit and miss to find such a lab.

Predictable inconsistency at best. 🙂

I've found both a Walgreens and a Walmart who both do a consistently "ok" job with scanning and haven't scratched a negative yet. I used to go to a Tar-jhay until the one guy there who knew what he was doing apparently quit and I got several rolls back with an annoying lengthwise scratch. I thought it was my Olympus doing it! 🙁

What REALLY annoyed me was that the so-called manager of the photo department, probably promoted from lawn and garden stock-room, didn't seem too concerned about it. 🙁

I always thought my hand-me-down printer (more like "if you want it, get it out of here, it's going in the trash") was only good for scratch copies until a guy on "another network" gave me one of the test files they use for checking the Fuji Frontiers. That was absolutely flawless compared to the mediocre scans printed at 8+x10+. The negative scanner will produce a very clean file that will size to a true 300dpi and it amazes me how nice it looks on that printer with good photo paper! The mini-lab scans at 1 meg and some (and even the independent lab scans at 3-some meg) look very rough in comparison when sized to print 8x10.

 

[Nikon Bob]

Bill

You are under a black cloud so don't go near the one mini lab I have been satisfied with or you may curse that too. Seriously, I said I was lucky to find and find little difficulty in understanding your rotten luck with negs so maybe you can believe that somewhere in an alternate universe it may be possible to get, at least on occasion, a scratch free neg. I think I'll have smoke now.

Bob

 

[Kat]

OT: speaking of minilabs, is there any significant difference between traditional printing and "digital printing"?