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Need Advice on Digitizing Slides
Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My
mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that. In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend? Thanks, Mirsky |
#2
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Need Advice on Digitizing Slides
Mirsky wrote:
Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that. In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend? Thanks, Mirsky There are actually some scanner groups, Mirsky, where they may be a little more up on the subject, that is if you don't get a good response here. alt.comp.periphs.scanner comp.periphs.scanner -- Paul (Take my hand, I'm standing right here) ------------------------------------------------------- Stop and Look http://www.geocities.com/dreamst8me/ |
#3
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Need Advice on Digitizing Slides
"Mirsky" wrote in message ... Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that. In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend? Thanks, Mirsky This vendor will give you an idea how much scanning that volume would cost: http://www.discountdigitalart.com/slides.html Probably a good idea to let them do it rather than buying a scanner. IMHO Jim Waggener |
#4
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Need Advice on Digitizing Slides
Mirsky wrote:
Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that. In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend? I don't know what your time is worth or what level of technical skills you have but I was in the same situation. I purchased a Nikon Coolscan V ED on eBay for about $550, worked all summer scanning the slides - shared the unit with a buddy who then did the same. We then resold the unit on Bay for almost what we paid for it $500 or so - total cost in dollars was nil but it DOES take a lot of time. Results were excellent, though. -- Seinfeld Lists http://tinyurl.com/f7k9d California Photos http://tinyurl.com/ann2l Sawyer's Nicknames http://tinyurl.com/gowma |
#5
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Need Advice on Digitizing Slides
In article
, Mirsky wrote: Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that. In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend? If your mother is "well to do" take the store. the cost will be many times the cost of a slide scanner. But, if she is bored and would like to re-live the content of the slides one at a time, buy her a Nikon Cool Scan V and set her to work. Needless to say, the results of this method will certainly reduce her credit card bills! In either case, the need to "edit' some of the picts using PSE will be about the same. Altho, the disks from the "photo scanning company" will be on CD or DVD and thus constitute a back-up that she will not have to make. |
#6
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Need Advice on Digitizing Slides
"Mirsky" wrote in message ... Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that. In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend? Thanks, Mirsky It would be much cheaper to do the scanning herself. By the time that she gets that many slide scans done, she will savvy about doing at least that job. Jim |
#7
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Need Advice on Digitizing Slides
Suggest you scan those old photos with a scanner,then create them to
photo slideshow by DVD burned. Your mom will view the slideshow on TV or DVD player easily. So you can try Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder for free trial. http://www.photo-to-dvd.com/dvd-slideshow-builder.html I think your mom isn't afraid those memoried photos. |
#8
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Need Advice on Digitizing Slides
Mirsky wrote:
Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that. In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend? Before I get into your question, the only thing I'd question that was posted earlier is that a flatbed scanner will do as good a job as a dedicated film scanner. I haven't gone to the time and expense of trying both, but the research I did said the opposite: For best results use a dedicated film scanner. That's not to say my research is right and the other poster is wrong. Just to alert you to the fact that there is a difference of opinion. Turning to self-scans vs. paying someone, I am in a somewhat similar situation and have scanned about 800 slides and negatives so far on my own -- and still have a lot to go. There are clear tradeoffs and I'm still not sure which way I'll go on the rest, or what mixture I'll use. Here's what I found: One scanning service I tried did a horrible job. Another did a great job. So, before committing 5,000 slides to one or another serivce, I'd like to see the results of a test sample. Ideally you'd also scan the same slides yourself (maybe borrowing someone's scanner) and compare. My horrible scans cost $0.80 each and my great ones cost $1.50 each. That's not to say that price and quality are always correlated, but it does say that 5,000 slides are likely to cost $5,000. That's a lot compared to the $600 I spent on my DiMAGE Scan Elite II, but I spend several minutes on each slide I scan. And if I use PSE (PhotoShop Elements) on it, allow another few minutes per slide. So, if your time is worth more than $20 or $30 an hour, it's "cheaper" to have an outside place do the scans. Even though I value my time at more than that, I'm still doing scans on my own. Why? As someone else pointed out, it's an opportunity to relive each slide's memories. Plus, I'm getting almost 20 Megapixel scans vs. only 5 Mp from the "great" outside shop. My scanner will do 80 Mp scans, but 20 Mp is plenty for all but the top few pictures that I might want to blow up into posters at some time. And, at 20 Mp, each scan is 60 MB. At 80 Mp they'd be 240 MB (almost a quarter of a gig!) each. While storage is getting cheap (a little under $1 per gig external), that still adds a non-trivial expense (tho getting cheaper over time) plus it loads the CPU needlessly on most pictures. Even once I've compressed to JPEG for storage on my internal drive (keeping the TIFFs on the external drive!), the 80 Mp pictures would take a long time to open and display on my 1.7 Mp screen. Admittedly, I zoom in on some and there the 20 Mp is nice to have. But 80 is probably overkill on most. Another advantage to scanning myself is I sometimes will crop at scan time instead of afterward. Not a big advantage, but still there. So why might I have an outside service do some or most of my remaining scans? At the rate I'm going, I might be dead before I finish my 5,000 scans. An outside service does it quickly. There's still a lot of work to organize the pictures, and PS takes about as much time as a scan, but if I am strong, I can resist the temptation to fix EVERY photo, and save that for the really good ones. Or do them first and come back to the others if there's time. Also, the good outside service seems to do some exposure and color correction that is equivalent to many of the changes I can make with PSE. That really saves time! And, if I find a slide they've scanned that I really love, I can always scan it myself and take lots of time on it. If you scan yourself, here are a few things I've learned (any corrections to things I've mislearned are welcome): I've found that auto-exposure helps on both slides and negatives. The default setting on my scanner was AE on negatives only. Early on, I tended to use additional manual exposure compensation (over and above what AE did) on dark slides, but tended to overdo it and got "blown out" whites. Better to use less compensation on the scan and use PSE or similar to fix via Levels, etc. Now I get good shadow detail, without blown out whites. It took a while to learn what helped in PSE, so allow some time for learning/experimenting. In my experience, Auto Smartfix tends to overdo it, but 10-20% Adjust Smartfix (another option) seemed to work better. Lately, I'm using Levels and Autolevels more. No one method works best on all pictures, which adds to the time it takes. If you have a Mac get GraphicConverter ($30 shareware). It will do batch renames and batch resizing, etc. Before I had GC, I had to rename each scan (e.g., TRAY15.tif0047 where the 0047 was an index added by the scanner software). Each time I did that the Mac OS asked me if I really wanted to change the extension! GC handled it nicely. Similarly, if you want to create smaller than 20 Mp pictures and/or limit the file size, GC does that very nicely. I imagine there's similar SW for Windows, but don't know what it is. My scanner software has ICE, ROC (restoration of color) and GEM (grain reduction). I use ICE all the time and it really helps. ROC and GEM don't seem to work so well and I've used PSE instead to restore color that wasn't what I wanted and to reduce noise. I also didn't find that noise reduction via multiple scans helped much if at all, so I've stopped using it. Hoping this helps. Martin |
#9
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Need Advice on Digitizing Slides
Mirsky wrote: Hi. I apologize if this question has been covered here before. My mother has over 5000 slides, taken by my father over a forty-year period. My mom wants to digitize the slides. However, she is unsure if she should buy a scanner to do the job herself or bring the slides to a photography store and have them do it for her. My mom isn't that savvy about computers so I'm tending to think that she should let a professional do the job. However, it might be too expensive to do that. In any case, I'd appreciate any advice on slide scanners and companies that will scan the slides. Which do you recommend? Thanks, Mirsky To put things in perspective, a basic scan with a dedicated film scanner will take at least 3 minutes/slide. It will take MUCH longer if you get fancy and use Digital ICE and/or some of the other image enhancing software. For 5,000 slides you are looking at 15,000 minutes or 250 hours!!!! Working 2.5 hours/day, every day, 7 days/week you are looking at over 3 months to complete the job. If Mom isn't very computer savvy, multiply that time by 1.5 or 2. Bottom Line......It ain't gonna happen. Let me suggest two approaches. 1. Almost certainly, not all 5,000 slides are "keepers". So choose the top 10%.....That's still more images than most people will voluntarily look at. 2. Let "Discount Digital Art" (Jim Waggener's suggested site) do a Deluxe scan for 45¢/slide. That is one helluva bargain for a 9MP image cropped, color corrected and treated with Digital ICE. For $225 the job will ACTUALLY get done with no muss and no fuss and you and your mom can get on with your lives.. If mom has a REAL interest in Digital Photography, you might consider getting a Nikon Coolpix 5600 and a Nikon slide copier adapter for about $225 total. Then let her copy her choices of slides. That method takes about 0.5 minutes per slide and you end up with a 5 MP image.......WAY, WAY more resolution than you need for viewing on a TV or Computer. That's plenty good enough for making 8x10 enlargements of the creme de la creme images Bob Williams |
#10
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Need Advice on Digitizing Slides
I don't know if it has been discussed already, but you also need a lot
of disc space to store the 5000 scans in high quality. So buying an external (or internal) disc will also be necessary. But indeed, very time-consuming is the major issue here! I'd go for the $225 professional scan. -Kris http://photoblog.krisvdv.net |
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