Negative Scanning?

[gtuned]

Okay, I'm trying to find a good negative scanner, but it's seeming near impossible to tell stuff apart. The Epson V370 is what I'm leaning towards, as the last scanner I had was horrible, everything was automatic which lead to off white balancing and everything. I'm trying to find one that'll be a good quality, but also take Rolls of negatives, as i've had people ask if I can restore them, and I don't want to chop up their negatives. So can someone give me an idea about what to get? Somewhere in the $200 range?

 

[AMG.]

IF it is a one off exercise I suggest you look at an alternative too. Try to hire a Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED. They are the top of the line scanners for Slides and negatives 35mm ONLY. The price of this (old) scanner is way above what you want to spend and I doubt that the model you have in mind could do a good job of it. As I have one I can talk from experience wrt the 5000ED, it takes filmstrips of 5 to 6 negatives/slides. It also takes single slides when in a frame, it does not take single negatives. I believe it can do rolls of 24/36 too but if Im not mistaken it needs an adaptor to do that.

I've scanned over 50,000 slides and a couple of 1000 negatives with it. You do also need to get hold of either the original software that comes with it or use Vuescan. I'm not sure if Vuescan is freeware or not and i have NO experience with it.

Before spending 200 suggest you try to get hold of various review and also check out e.g. photography-on-the.net forum to see if there's something mentioned there.

 

[wfooshee]

Scanning negatives on a glass flatbed is possible, but not satisfactory. The use of 3rd-party software such as VueScan will improve the experience dramatically. Scanning software that comes with a scanner will be aimed at the general public, and thus will be useless. VueScan will let you adjust white balance, even select film type for a good set of presets in the color corrections.

The big problem with scanning on a flatbed is sharpness. The scanner simply can't focus exactly on the negative, so the scans come out soft.

As AMG states, though, film scanners are $$$$$$. I bought one when my dad passed because I had almost 5000 slides in his collection that I wanted to digitize for the family. Mine is an LS 2000, an older SCSI model, so getting an adapter and cable for a modern PC might be a hassle, and Nikon's software won't run on Win7, thus my discovery of VueScan.

Here's a negative scanned on an Epson flatbed scanner (V330) and the same frame scanned on the LS-2000. VueScan handled both scanners.

V330:

LS-2000:

1-to-1 crop of the V330 scan:

1-to-1 crop of the LS-2000 scan:

 

[gtuned]

Thanks guys,

I looked up an LS-2000, and there's one on ebay for 144, but I really don't want to risk that on an eBay sale. The quality is quite dramatic between the flatbed and professional obviously, but the V330 seems good enough for now, get one of those and a DigitaLiza from Lomography. Film is just something I mess around with, and with the restoration/digitizing, I still think the flatbed would be sharp enough for now, I was just wondering which one to go with, with all the different options and stuff. The few scans i did on the kodak turned out pretty sharp minus the scan lines and stray RGB pixels scattered throughout.

I think anything will be better than the Ion Film 2 SD I got before. It was quick and easy but the fully automatic sucked horribly, and so did it's noise reduction and white balacing.

 

[wfooshee]

That one on eBay doesn't seem to have any of the actual film carriers.... Not useful. That big black cave where the door opens is supposed to be stuffed with something that holds slides, or a different something that holds negatives.