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Living Room / Re: digitising slides
« on: July 12, 2013, 02:05 PM »
If you have 35mm film in general to scan and a smartphone, you might want to check out the Lomography Smartphone Film Scanner. Hmm, looks like they're out of stock at the moment but I imagine they'll have them back before too long.
I got one when they launched it as a Kickstarter project. Works pretty well, at least as long as you're dealing with strips of negatives or unmounted slides - the limiting factor is really your smartphone's camera. I have an iPhone 3GS and the scans are pretty good. It's certainly a lot faster and easier than either the old, old AcerScan SCSI flatbed with transparency adapter that I had way-back-when or my current Epson PhotoPerfection flatbed with its transparency accessories. Is it perfect? No, certainly not - mounted slides just aren't going to work with its design, for example, and I'm sure that a really high quality dedicated photo scanner in the hands of a pro will get much better results - but I'd say that it's got those little 5MP flash scanners beat at the very least, especially for the "average Joe" who just wants a reasonable quality archive of old vacation photos. Scan everything yourself, set aside the cream of the crop as you go, then either pay to have those best ones done professionally or redo them yourself at a higher quality. Honestly, most of your friends and extended family really don't care whether they have your amateur photos from your grade school field trip saved at all because they're never going to look at them. The friends at your class reunion might want to see them but probably don't care if they're archived at high quality. You yourself, if you're honest, probably don't need archival quality scans of ALL of your negatives. I know I had to admit that as I started chipping away at my own huge bins full.
The real "fun" comes if someone in the family had a Kodak Disc camera. :'( Not fun at all!! I'm not sure whether anyone will still reprint the photos from the original discs and the prints that we have suffer badly from both fading and colour shifting. Scanning the discs is difficult and the quality is really, really poor. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with those. Two family weddings and several major family vacations and all I've got to work with are my mom's Kodak Disc photos. :o
I got one when they launched it as a Kickstarter project. Works pretty well, at least as long as you're dealing with strips of negatives or unmounted slides - the limiting factor is really your smartphone's camera. I have an iPhone 3GS and the scans are pretty good. It's certainly a lot faster and easier than either the old, old AcerScan SCSI flatbed with transparency adapter that I had way-back-when or my current Epson PhotoPerfection flatbed with its transparency accessories. Is it perfect? No, certainly not - mounted slides just aren't going to work with its design, for example, and I'm sure that a really high quality dedicated photo scanner in the hands of a pro will get much better results - but I'd say that it's got those little 5MP flash scanners beat at the very least, especially for the "average Joe" who just wants a reasonable quality archive of old vacation photos. Scan everything yourself, set aside the cream of the crop as you go, then either pay to have those best ones done professionally or redo them yourself at a higher quality. Honestly, most of your friends and extended family really don't care whether they have your amateur photos from your grade school field trip saved at all because they're never going to look at them. The friends at your class reunion might want to see them but probably don't care if they're archived at high quality. You yourself, if you're honest, probably don't need archival quality scans of ALL of your negatives. I know I had to admit that as I started chipping away at my own huge bins full.
The real "fun" comes if someone in the family had a Kodak Disc camera. :'( Not fun at all!! I'm not sure whether anyone will still reprint the photos from the original discs and the prints that we have suffer badly from both fading and colour shifting. Scanning the discs is difficult and the quality is really, really poor. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with those. Two family weddings and several major family vacations and all I've got to work with are my mom's Kodak Disc photos. :o