Re: Digital scanners - Any good?

On Jul 23, 12:56 pm, "Joe" <NoM...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I've never used a digital scanner before, but I have loads of old negatives
I'd love to see as JPEGs onscreen and possibly printed out as photographs.

Nothing wrong with that.

The thing is, how good are these scanners and are there some better than
others?

Some are so-so, others are good, others yet are
very good. Depends on how much you want to
spend on the hardware and invest in learning
how to use one.

How does the scanned negative JPG file look compared to say a
6Mpixel digital camera like my Canon EOS 10D?

With a good scanner and reasonable negatives,
film can definitely look better. Cutoff point seems to
be about 10-12Mpixels: after that, digital has a
definite advantage compared to 35mm film.
At high ISO settings, 6Mpixel can look a
lot better than an old high ISO film. That is
not so true with modern high speed film.


Are the files produced by
scanners huge?

They can be, if you scan at high resolution.
You can always apply compression techniques
to bring them down in size. Typical tiff file
at 2000dpi, 32-bit colour and lzw compression
is around 10Mbyte. When moved to jpg it
comes down to around 1Mbyte.


Any advice appreciated.

Go here:
wizofoz2k.deviantgart.com
and here:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~nsouto/photos/John/
to see many examples of old and new film scanned with a
modern, high quality scanner. Most are reduced in size
to either 1600 or 1280 max width, from
original scans at 2000dpi - which translates to
around 2800 pixels on the wide in the original.

Of course you can always scan at higher
resolution or reduce a scanned size.
Up to you and how much disk you got.

.

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