Film Scanners

rafe bustin wrote:
On Mon, 07 Feb 2005 17:51:33 +0900, Stewy
wrote:

In article ,
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 bought the 1800i a couple of years back and have been very pleased
with the results. Scans result in a 8 megapixel image which is quite
adequate for printing.


Something's wrong with your math here.

1800 dpi can't get 8 megapixels from a
35 mm frame. A 35 mm frame is approx
1.5 square inches, which would be 4.86
Mpixels at 1800 dpi.


FWIW, I started out in film scanning
with a Microtek 35t+, which was 1950
dpi -- and from that I got images a
little over 5 Mpixels.


My 'primitive' HP S20 scanned a mid-50s
Kodachrome® 35mm slide at
2400dpi and saved it at
2221 x 3275 and as
*TIFF at 20.8*MB;
Photo Shop saved it as a biggest-possible
*JPEG at 8.39*MB


That included enough in the frame you could
see all the fuzz from the cardboard mount
trailing into the image, and the round corners.


--
Frank ess

"Because of the Swiss Cheese nature of everyone's life experience and
education, the Whoosh Bird can drop a load on anyone's head, without
warning." -Albrecht Einstein

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

Please send e-mails to

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

Please send e-mails to

Gel writes:

All Things Mopar wrote in
:

Robert Feinman commented courteously ...

The rule-of-thumb is to take the dpi of the scanner and
divide by 300 to get the degree of enlargement you can
expect with best quality for prints.





Thanks to all for your comments, very helpful. If it was just for the
old folks Transparencies, I would probably farm the job out, but I also
would like to keep my film cameras and process the negs then scan them in
and print what I want and archive the rest ( if they are worth archiving
:-) )

Maybe I'm weird, but I actually enjoy spending a few hours scanning and
editing....

Me too! It's the few hours after *that*, and the few hours after
*THAT*, and then the hours the next three days, that start to get
tiresome.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
RKBA: http://noguns-nomoney.com/ http://www.dd-b.net/carry/
Pics: http://dd-b.lighthunters.net/ http://www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/
Dragaera/Steven Brust: http://dragaera.info/

35mm scanned at 1800ppi is 4mp not 8, you get a 12mb uncompressed tif file. Had
a Microtek 1850 for about 5 years in the early 90's, know that file size well.

Tom

In article ,
says...

On Mon, 07 Feb 2005 17:51:33 +0900, Stewy
wrote:

In article ,
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 bought the 1800i a couple of years back and have been very pleased
with the results. Scans result in a 8 megapixel image which is quite
adequate for printing.


Something's wrong with your math here.

1800 dpi can't get 8 megapixels from a
35 mm frame. A 35 mm frame is approx
1.5 square inches, which would be 4.86
Mpixels at 1800 dpi.


FWIW, I started out in film scanning
with a Microtek 35t+, which was 1950
dpi -- and from that I got images a
little over 5 Mpixels.


rafe b.
http://www.terrapinphoto.com

In article ,
rafe bustin wrote:

On Mon, 07 Feb 2005 17:51:33 +0900, Stewy
wrote:

In article ,
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 bought the 1800i a couple of years back and have been very pleased
with the results. Scans result in a 8 megapixel image which is quite
adequate for printing.


Something's wrong with your math here.

1800 dpi can't get 8 megapixels from a
35 mm frame. A 35 mm frame is approx
1.5 square inches, which would be 4.86
Mpixels at 1800 dpi.

Whoops! You're right of course was thinking of 24mm x 36mm


FWIW, I started out in film scanning
with a Microtek 35t+, which was 1950
dpi -- and from that I got images a
little over 5 Mpixels.


rafe b.
http://www.terrapinphoto.com

In article m,
says...
Another "agree". I only did about 50 before I gave up. It is a slow,
tedious, unpleasant task. I recommend sending them to a specialty house and
let them do it. 1000 slides should take you about 2 years.

Don Dunlap

and after the first 1000, you will want to redo most of them because you
are just getting the hang of it now.

On Tue, 08 Feb 2005 13:28:51 +0900, Stewy
wrote:

In article ,
rafe bustin wrote:

On Mon, 07 Feb 2005 17:51:33 +0900, Stewy
wrote:

In article ,
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 bought the 1800i a couple of years back and have been very pleased
with the results. Scans result in a 8 megapixel image which is quite
adequate for printing.


Something's wrong with your math here.

1800 dpi can't get 8 megapixels from a
35 mm frame. A 35 mm frame is approx
1.5 square inches, which would be 4.86
Mpixels at 1800 dpi.

Whoops! You're right of course was thinking of 24mm x 36mm

Yes, that's 35 mm film. 1.5 square
inches is a very close approximation..
and makes it easy to get total pixels
from dpi.


rafe b.
http://www.terrapinphoto.com

(O;

rafe bustin wrote:
On Tue, 08 Feb 2005 13:28:51 +0900, Stewy
wrote:

In article ,
rafe bustin wrote:

On Mon, 07 Feb 2005 17:51:33 +0900, Stewy
wrote:

In article ,
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 bought the 1800i a couple of years back and have been very pleased
with the results. Scans result in a 8 megapixel image which is quite
adequate for printing.


Something's wrong with your math here.

1800 dpi can't get 8 megapixels from a
35 mm frame. A 35 mm frame is approx
1.5 square inches, which would be 4.86
Mpixels at 1800 dpi.

Whoops! You're right of course was thinking of 24mm x 36mm

Yes, that's 35 mm film. 1.5 square
inches is a very close approximation..
and makes it easy to get total pixels
from dpi.

Yup. I've just checked the arithmetic -- except that 1.5
inches square is a tad generous. I make it about 1.33 inches
square. But never mind, the point is well made.

----- Paul J. Gans