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.

[rowlena_rose]

when I worked as a photo tech at a Eckard Pharmacy in college(only about 3.5 years ago) we had a machine that allowed us to do slides, we charged .50 a slide for a normal resolution scan and the 1.00 for a high res. It took time usually about a week and half(this might also have been because I was the only one that did it and I only worked 20 hours a week). So if you get desperate you might go to a photo printing place that does wet prints and see if they can fit your needs. Our machine was a fuji frontier so look for a fuji machine.

Best wishes!

[semiauto]

you can get a light table for about $35, that you could use to view each frame and help narrow things down. my husband scans thousands of photos and he has an epson flat bed with a film carrier. of course, his are spaced out over time, but it does work well. otherwise, fast film scanners are $$$.

[mustangracer]

I did a whole bunch of images from 40 year old silver negatives at www.scancafe.com

I was VERY happy with the service, quality and turn around time. What was taking me forever, took them 4 weeks.

However, I did use a light box to preview and prioritize the negatives prior to sending them in.

Here is a direct link to their pricing: http://www.scancafe.com/pricing

[neferde]

What about something like http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16838135011 which has a built-in viewer? It allows triage and, if the image is a good one, instant scanning of said image. My dad went through boxes of old negatives from the 1940's and 50's last year using his Epson scanner and each strip of film took him between 3 and 5 minutes in the scanner to pre-scan, triage, then scan individual pictures. Sadly he didn't learn that products like the above existed until after he was done, but he's mentioned more than once that if he ever has to scan negatives like that again he's going to shell out the $100 for a dedicated negative scanner like the one above.