scanner for making contact sheets?

[hatidua]

Can anyone advise as to what the cheapest scanner is that will allow me to place a page of negatives on it and create my own contact sheets? I don't really care about the technical quality of the scans as I have drum scans made from the ones I eventually select.

 

[whitecat]

I lay my plastic sleeved negs right on the glass and place another glass on top of that.
Works great. Here is a small sample.

 

[hatidua]

Is this on ANY scanner or one that has a light source in the lid?

 

[whitecat]

This is a regular flatbed scanner. I really don't know about many of them. Look into the Epson line for more info.

 

[Haigh]

These look good. I'll try this on my V700. Thanks for posting.

 

[venchka]

I have never had any luck scanning a negative on a document scanner. The kind without a light in the top.
Epson scanners that work for 8x10 film will scan an area large enough for a contact sheet. 1680, 4990, V700, V750. Otherwise, you'll have to do it in sections.

 

[damien.murphy]

Can anyone advise as to what the cheapest scanner is that will allow me to place a page of negatives on it and create my own contact sheets? I don't really care about the technical quality of the scans as I have drum scans made from the ones I eventually select.

Do you need to replicate a darkroom-style contact sheet?

I currently use a Canon 8800F, which takes 2 strips of negatives at a time, and take 1 1200dpi scan of the area that encompasses the 2 strips. From here, I take the file into lightroom, crop out the individual frames, and use photo-editing software to auto-level and sharpen each frame.

This leaves me with a 1650x 1100 pixel scan of each frame, perfect for web use, and image evaluation.

I've just started to do this, but I needed to do something, as I only get to my darkroom every 3 or 4 weeks, and to be honest am not overly fond of spending my limited darkroom time making 35mm contact sheets.

I feel differently about 120 6x6 contact sheets which I consider a thing of beauty, and more like 12 small prints, than just a contact sheet. Thus I will continue to make wet-printed 120 contact sheets.

 

[hatidua]

Do you need to replicate a darkroom-style contact sheet? .

Not necessarily, more of a way of evaluating images in determining which ones I'll have drum scanned.

I'll look into some of the options listed in various replies here.

thank you all!

 

[v3cron]

I use the multicrop function in Vuescan along with an Epson V500. It gives you a separate file for each image, with not too much fiddling around in the software. I lay the sheet down under the light source two strips at a time. Goes a lot faster than it sounds, and you can flip through and tag your images in Lightroom or whatever afterwards. I find it much easier to evaluate them that way. I scan the picks on an Imacon or just wet print them.

 

[damien.murphy]

Do you need to replicate a darkroom-style contact sheet?

I currently use a Canon 8800F, which takes 2 strips of negatives at a time, and take 1 1200dpi scan of the area that encompasses the 2 strips. From here, I take the file into lightroom, crop out the individual frames, and use photo-editing software to auto-level and sharpen each frame.

This leaves me with a 1650x 1100 pixel scan of each frame, perfect for web use, and image evaluation.

I've just started to do this, but I needed to do something, as I only get to my darkroom every 3 or 4 weeks, and to be honest am not overly fond of spending my limited darkroom time making 35mm contact sheets.

I feel differently about 120 6x6 contact sheets which I consider a thing of beauty, and more like 12 small prints, than just a contact sheet. Thus I will continue to make wet-printed 120 contact sheets.

Should note the reason I make one scan of the area comprising the two strips is mainly speed. I find it a lot faster to make just one scan like this, than to set the multi-crop options in the software and then wait for the scanner to make 12 individual scans. The trade-off is additional time required in image editing software to crop, level and sharpen the frames, but on my 8800F with Vuesan, it works out faster than going the multi-crop route, even at 1200dpi, with the difference becoming only greater with the use of higher dpi's (and thus longer scanning times).