Hi all.
Looking for suggestions/recommendations for a preferably compact photo/slide scanner that delivers reasonably good quality results. I have a heap of old family photos going back 60+ years that I need to digitise and possibly mount on a dedicated website.
Thanks for your assistance!
Best value photo/slide scanner
Sweet3st on 29/10/2014 - 10:30
Comments
a quick 1 button press with auto correct on microsoft picture manager
(last came on office 2007 not newer versions)
or if not happy ajust manually,
Genurally slides need a slight ajustment and then dont look as old as may think!Wipe slides with micro fibre cloth before scanning.
These have a good reputation
http://www.digitalcamerawarehouse.com.au/prod8655.htm
They also come with the Silverfast software which is an industry staple. Otherwise consider a Canoscan
https://store.canon.com.au/en/Our-Products/Faxes-and-Scanner…
some used Plusteks on eBay, or consider that if you get a new Plustek, you'll get >50% of the cost back after you finish digitising.
Don't waste your time with those $50 slide scanners you see at Aldi or eBay. You need a brand name like Epson, Canon or Plustek as mentioned above. I have an Epson V500 and can recommend the brand.
At the risk of being howled down, last year I used http://www.kogan.com/au/buy/combo-scanner-5-1/ to digitize my 35mm slides accumulated over 40 years (there were a couple of thousand). I tried do do some photos with it as well, but my Canon 700f does a better & faster job. On the slides, the Kogan did not miss a beat. Quality was OK. The scanned images, after enhancement, look better on the LED-LCD screen than out of a slide projector.
I picked the Kogan unit up for $75 when it was on special. I see it's $119 now.
I have a couple of the cheap all-in-one scanners and they are rubbish. You are better off with a brand name like Epson or Canon - get one secondhand. The Canon I have has the appropriate plastic holders for slides and negatives as well as having the light in the lid so it is complete. I do hundreds of slides, photos and negatives for my own family and other people and the quality is superb. The other alternative is to buy a new one, do all you have to do and then sell it "as new" as a secondhand unit. (Someone should come up with a reasonable hiring scheme because so many people need to do their scanning but once it's done their scanner is rarely used.)
Could I ask how those of you who have had success doing this, adjust the exposure of the scanned slides during scanning? My cheap scanner always adjusts to the average brightness over the whole slide, often resulting in sub-optimal exposure. Do the better units allow brightness adjustment before scanning the file? Thanks.
There are only a few of the scanner controls I use - dust removal, fading and a couple of others for badly faded or photos or slides that are pretty bad. I rely on my photo software to make any other changes after scanning is complete then you don't get 'average' changes. You should be able to turn off any adjustments you don't want.
I had this same issue and was contemplating purchasing a better scanner - tried some of the $100-150 scanners with ADF or Automatic feed (eg Epson DS40/50) but the quality was rubbish and returned for refund. Those cheapo combo ones from Officeworks (eg http://www.officeworks.com.au/shop/officeworks/qpix-photo-st… or anything that looks remotely like this) are a waste of time. I bought a HP Scanjet 5590 which has an ADF, flatbed scanner and film / slide attachment for $50 second hand (they currently retail at $1153.90 at Officeworks!!) and even though the quality is good from the flatbed / slide attachment, the ADF doesn't handle photos so well (as it works like a normal printer ADF having to flip the page). I didn't want to take forever to scan all the photos.
My solution was actually at K-mart. At some stores, they have the Kodak Rapid Photo Scanner II (http://www.kodak.com/global/en/business/retailPhoto/products…) which has an A4 automatic feeder and scans at 600dpi (which is certainly good enough for A4 enlargements of standard size photos). It scans photos pretty quickly and the quality is actually pretty good (roughly equivalent to the Scanjet 5590 at the same resolution). I scanned all my childhood photos (and those for my family) - and they save them to DVD for $10 or thereabouts (obviously if you have a lot of photos you would need to save them on a few disks - I almost completely filled a disk with my photos and then another for family pics. Officeworks have the same setup as well - you need to look at the individual shop though as some only put the images onto CD for the same charge (which will end up being a lot more costly) and some also have the older version of the scanner which only does 300dpi. You can pick up the actual scanner from ebay, but the cheapest I could find second hand was about $500, which wasn't worth it for me.
Even though the Scanjet has a slide / negative attachment, it is a pain to have to reload the attachment every time you finish the previous set (I have no patience!). I bought a Kaiser Baas Photo and Negative Scanner (http://www.kaiserbaas.com/converters-category/photo-and-nega…) on special for about $120 and that has a slot that you just feed the negatives though and it does the whole lot at 1200dpi. Quality is quite good. (it does photos as well - scanned to 600dpi - not quite as good as the kodak ones and a hell of a lot slower).
Hope that helps
I have more Kodachrome slides to process than photos or negs. Is a flatbed plus accessory still best for my situation?
Also, how much does the scanner's DPI matter? I note that most are something like 1200x2400 that upscales to 9600. But most photoscanners seem to operate at about 600DPI. Presumably the higher the resolution the slower the process.
Flatbed print and slide scanners operate at a range of DPI, lower for paper, and higher for slides due to the small size. It senses automatically from the presence of the attachment. A resolution of 3200 DPI for a 24x36 mm slide works out to be about 400 DPI for a printed A4 page. That's the resolution I use so I end up with 4000x2700 px images. The scanner can go up to 9600 DPI but it would be much slower and the photo quality isn't that great (the lens used at the time) to start with.
The scanner I have takes 4 slides per go and I have a routine worked out so that it only takes about 2 minutes per slide all up. The great thing is the provided software does a lot of automatic adjustments and I only tweak it a bit for some backlit photos. The knobs are there if you want to tweak a lot, but I usually don't need that. Otherwise it would be far more time consuming than 2 minutes.
Thanks. So, which do you use?
Epson V500. Compromise between quality and my wallet. There was a $50 cashback at the time, so it cost me under $300 all up. You'll see from reviews that the Epson software is an important component of the package.
You have to think about the finished result and what you want to use them for. If you are just making a copy of a document of no historical significance then 300 dpi is usually fine (that allows you to print the document at the same size without any loss of quality). HOWEVER, if you are scanning old photos and documents to keep in your family history then I would suggest you use higher resolution. I usually scan slides at up to 2400dpi because they are small to start with and I will want to enlarge them to make prints. Scan them at low resolution and your prints will look grainy or be pixelated. By the way, got a group photo (say a school photo) with loads of faces? Scan it at higher resolution so that later you can enlarge a single face if necessary.
In relation to time, scanning at higher resolution does take longer BUT you are going to spend a bit of time scanning anyway, why not spend a little extra time (say 15%) to get a first class job?
not so compact but we just bought a epson perfection 1260, off gumtree under $50..
Its a full sized flat bed scanner, But after researching the $100ish small ones available @ Ebay, Officeworks, Dicksmiths ect, Realised need to spend around $200 if you want decent quality photos, as per poor reviews
Im sure if you came across a epson (or other know brand) you wont be dissapointed in quality..
Just be aware if you go on the hunt for the epson branded ones, The slide scanner is an optional add on, We where lucky enough to get it… Its basicly a plastic tray to put on the scanner, and a translucent light device to place on top of the slide…
We are 100% Happy with the 60 year old slides we have been doing last few days…