Film negative viewer - scanning

[tudorpot]

I have a few boxes of 35 mm film negatives that I'd like to review and scan selected images. Looking for suggestions/reviews of viewers and scanners. I have an Epson scanner with a film negative holder - it's older but still works, I also have a newer Canon printer scanner, but I think it might be too slow doing such large numbers of images. Was

Comments

[lapenn]

if you have access to a college or can afford it, you can buy a really nice, dedicated film scanner. It still takes plenty of time to scan, but the quality is really nice. I always just took a book and enjoyed reading (or I guess nowadays you could watch a movie or something) while I scanned my film.

[tudorpot]

I'm not sure you understood my post. I have thousands of film negative images to scan. I want to triage - sort them - so that I can then do a good quality scan of the better images.

[lapenn]

Do you own a light board? That's what I do for preliminary triage. You can also get those little things you hold up to the light to look at negatives, but those are less useful. Anyway, I use the light board to see if I remember the photo or if it is even worth looking at. In terms of triaging them any other way, well, I *think* there is an option to scan a whole strip at a time on a scanner. and, of course, just dial down the quality so it scans quicker. In my experience, negatives have to be scanned twice because the computer does a preliminary scan, you select the image, and then you scan again to get the final quality.

[tudorpot]

I don't have a light board, but was thinking that might be a way of sorting them. It's a daunting task, but I know there are some good pics in there including some that are from pictures lost when our home burnt down.

[lapenn]

Light boards are fairly useful. Most useful for slides, of course. I find negatives more tricky because, obviously, everything is reversed. I did once go through a whole box full of negs with a light board and label what was on each roll (I thankfully have most negatives sorted into holders or envelopes by roll -- bless the foresight of my 16 yo self).

Here's a thought -- have you tried just lining up a bunch of negatives on the scanner and seeing how a whole flatbed of them scans? Still tedious, but at least it's faster. Then, you could zoom in and see what pics you might be interested in. You couldn't tell pic quality very well, I don't think, but you would know the topic.

[tudorpot]

I will try that. Re - org negs- mine are - these are family member's negs

[lapenn]

Good luck!