On Aug 7, 2005, at 8:55 AM, Vic Mortelmans wrote:
The speed is the one that triggered me by most. My experience with scanning photographs on a (cheap) flatbed-scanner is that it takes a lot of time fiddling about in the applications to position the image, cut and paste etc... I assume it's about the same trouble scanning negatives.
A dedicated film scanner is much easier to work with. Load negs into the holder, fit in the slot, tell scanner to go scan four at a time after you set up the scan parameters.
But if my setup succeeds, I'd just have to slide in the negative, look on the lcd if it's positioned ok, shoot and go over the the next slide. At the end, I put the memory card in the computer and I have the bitmaps ready for...
It will be fine if the quality is acceptable for your needs.
...processing. Indeed: that's the part that still frightens me. b&w is probably quite easy. Adjusting gamma maybe sufficient to get a good picture. I don't worry about color, because I send them to the lab and make them print all the pictures, so if I want them digitally, I can still scan from photograph.
There's an art to preparing any image for presentation that comes from practice and developed skills. Scanned film images generally require more image processing work than digital camera exposures to look their best, whether B&W or color work. Scanning from the original film produces significantly better results than scanning from a paper print, both due to the higher resolution and contrast gain.
But as I said, if the resolution is adequate for your desires, the setup you're putting together should be fine. Can't hurt to give it a try. I'll try to prep some of my Minox film captures for display soon.
Godfrey
