Re: looking for Mac OS X compatible 35mm slide scanner

On Dec 12, 2:36 pm, Nelson <nel...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 12 Dec 2007 13:30:54 -0500, Eric wrote
(in article
<f8685408-7f16-47f8-a390-7097031a7...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>):



On Dec 12, 10:22 am, Tim Streater <tim.strea...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article
<beb4a32c-3620-4d41-9195-27233ea64...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,

Eric <eric...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Dec 12, 9:51 am, Harald Hanche-Olsen <han...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
+ Eric <eric...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

Thanks for your response. I'm starting to lean towards a true film
scanner, as opposed to a flatbed because of comments such as yours.
The lower end models are within a reasonable cost. Once I scan in my
families slides (> 1000), I may no longer have a need for it. So I
don't want to go into anything too professional or there won't be a
good ROI.

I think you will find that scanning slides is MUCH more time consuming
than you can possibly imagine. In my experience, scanning a single
film can easily take hours. You don't just stick the film (or slides)
in thescannerand push a button: You look at the preview of each
frame, then adjust controls manually to get a reasonable result. Then
there is a long wait while thescannerworks, and you'll probably want
to make further adjustments in photoshop afterwards. A bit of
disclaimer: It's been a couple years since I did any film scanning.
Maybe scanners and software have improved to make this much faster and
less labour intensive. My point is that, depending on the relative
value of money versus time for you, you may wish to put more money
into thescannerin order to save time.

--
* Harald Hanche-Olsen <URL:http://www.math.ntnu.no/~hanche/>
- It is undesirable to believe a proposition
when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.
-- Bertrand Russell

Well, I certainly don't want to spend hours scanning each slide. I am
looking for more of the 'push a button' model. Then any touchup I did
after that would be in iPhoto. So I guess I am looking for a quality
scannerthat will get the slide into the ballpark range then scan it
relatively quickly.

You *will* spend hours scanning each slide. Whether the touch-up is in
iPhoto or PS, it takes time. I have no experience of expensive scanners
(I have a Microtek FilmScan 2700 costing about £130) but I can't imagine
the overall throughput rate is gonna be high. You're unlikely to be able
to put 50 slides in and have a pile of TIFFs 5 mins later. Not at a
reasonable price, anyway.

If I were to take these slides to a service (and I saw one for as
little as 19 cents per slide), there's no way they would be spending
anywhere near that amount of time on each slide (not at the rate they
are charging people). Maybe they have high quality, expensive
equipment; I don't know. I hoping to find something that I can afford
that will allow me to do this task at a moderate pace.

Eric

I just saw an article in the January 2008 Consumer Reports where they
rated two flatbed scanners (Canon CanoScan 8800F, $200 and Epson
Perfection V500, $250) "well suited to converting old negatives and
slides into digital files." Might be worth a look.

--
Nelson

--
Posted via a free Usenet account fromhttp://www.teranews.com

Thanks Nelson, it was worth a look.

Eric

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