Best Scanner

[Ety]

I am going to be taking a Photography class in school and it's all film. I already have a decent film SLR and I would like to get a decent scanner. What would some good ones be that are around $200~ Thanks.

 

[Tim_axe]

If you want to scan film well, avoid flatbed scanners. Unfortunately a good film scanner from say Nikon is quite expensive and probably out of your $200 budget.

See if your school has a newspaper / photo department and check if they have a film scanner that you could use. My photo department has a film scanner...and all of their cameras are digital. I'll probably bring a few of my negatives over the year and scan them there...

 

[Hinokagutsuchi]

I use a Canon CanoScan 4200F to scan my negatives, and it works well for the $90 I paid for it.



That's a negative that I scanned in. It's not the ultra-high quality of a digital SLR, but it works fine for my needs.

 

[Obama]

which scanner is the best now?

i'd like to scan negatives and all the paper photos and probably some documents too...

maybe there is a good one with laserprinter and copier integrated aswell?

 

[MN Scout]

which scanner is the best now?

i'd like to scan negatives and all the paper photos and probably some documents too...

maybe there is a good one with laserprinter and copier integrated aswell?

The Epson V700 and V750 are probably the best for scanning negatives in the flat bed scanner market. The V500 and V600 second. The measured optical DPI of the V700 is around 2300dpi. This is much less than a dedicated film scanner, even though this is the best flatbed. The V600, 1560 dpi. With certain techniques like wet mounting and using an adjustable height film holder, you may be able to improve that dpi measurement slightly.

You can get some of the old Nikon film scanners on ebay. You may have to use the firewire connection and the Vuescan software. The Nikon Coolscan 9000 is the best at $3k+ right now. You can get some of the older film scanners used for much cheaper. The problem with all these older film scanners is that they can no longer be serviced. Plustek is releasing a new OpticFilm 120 scanner hopefully sometime this year that looks comparable to the Coolscan 9000, they also have some current film scanners that are pretty good also.

Flat bed scanners work best for medium format film (large film area, plus the lower dpi still results in a large enough file to be useful). Their quality for 35mm is not the best. That being said, for web display, and 4x6 printing, flat bed scanners should be good enough.

I highly recommend that you look into Vuescan, if you have a lot of color negatives you need to scan. I've been using it for the last year, and it does an excellent job when compared to the Epson Scan software.

I have no experience with integrated printer copiers.

I have two Canon FS4000US film scanners, and one Epson V500. The two film scanners have scanned a total of 6,000 pictures so far. The FS4000US have USB and SCSI. They scan the fastest on SCSI, and is what I'm using. They are a very sharp scanner, but have a bit more noise than the more expensive Nikon Coolscan 5000 and V film scanners.

There is also a company called ScanCafe that you may be interested in using if you have a lot of negatives. I've read of a lot of positive comments from individuals who have used them. If you are a professional image person the quality might vary enough that you might not be 100% happy all the time, but for us normal people they are a good option. They often have sales where the scanning is 20-30% off. Sign up for their email list and you'll get some sale flyer atleast every month. Last spring I was all ready to send off negatives to them, but then felt I wanted a lot more control, and ended up getting the 2 film scanners.

There are a lot of discussion on photo.net about scanning film, that you can also look at.

PM me if you want any more information about my family photo scanning adventure.

 

[Deleted member 88227]

Holy necro thread!