Thread: Film Scanners
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Old February 7th 05, 10:14 PM
Gautam Majumdar
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On Sun, 06 Feb 2005 23:56:08 +0000, Gel wrote:

I have a large (1000+) amount of 35mm transparencies to scan to DVD and
have been looking in Jessops ( UK ) at their brand (1800dpi) at £100-
Now, would I be better off with a Minolta at £2-300 more? Or would the
quality of the Jessops cheapie be sufficient?
I will also be using the scanner for 35mm film negative scanning, does
this require the better quality scanner...

I am using Jessops (branded PF3650Pro3) slide + film scanner for the last
two months. It costs GBP260. It comes with build-in ICE dust & spot
removing software. It also has ROC & GEM software which can help in
restoring old negatives. I have not tried those two but ICE is really
helpful for old slides.

It is quite easy to use and can do upto 3600 dpi. Slides are single feed
but negatives can be scanned up to 36 (if you have a long strip like that)
in one go. However, for cut up negatives in 4 frames, you have to feed it
twice as the scanner ignores the first two frames. It takes 3-4 minutes
for each scan using ICE and about 1 min without at resolution of 900 (that
I use most of the time allowing from some cropping). At 3600 dpi with ICE
it takes over 5 min for each slide. More or less the same time for
negatives.

I assume that you don't intend to print from the scanned images as you
would still have the original slides & negatives for that purpose. If you
are going to see the images only on your PC screen, even 1800 dpi is
probably an overkill. I tried out from 300 to 3600 dpi and found that
anything from 720 dpi upwards looked virtually the same on the PC screen.
If you are going to use a projector (most has a resolution of 1024 long
axis) scans at a higher than 720 dpi is probably not going to make much
difference as at that dpi you would get 1024 pixels. Again, I tried out at
various scanning resolution for projection and found very little
difference on higher resolution with standard projectors. Some
professional projectors are supposed to have higher resolution but I have
not had a chance to test my images on any of them yet.

Scanning slides/negatives is a time consuming business. You would need to
do some post-processing with an image editing software. The Jessops one
comes with a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 which I found quite
adequate for minimum necessary processing. Of course, you would need a
better one if you wish to manipulate the images extensively.

This scanner can do both 16 or 8 bit colour scanning. I found that 16 bit
scanning gives better results though the PSE-2 (and several others I have
used) reduces it to 8 bit colour.

I would suggest you check the product you are planning to buy for ICE. It
is really helpful and would save a lot of time during image processing as
you would need very little "clone" processing to remove the spots.

--

Gautam Majumdar

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