Auto Slide Scanners

I want to scan a bunch of family slides. The Nikon 5000ED scanner with
the SF-210 auto slide feeder retails for about $1500. Are there no
other brands? How does one find used ones that are reliable? Respond
to

"john" wrote in message
ups.com...
I want to scan a bunch of family slides. The Nikon 5000ED scanner with
the SF-210 auto slide feeder retails for about $1500. Are there no
other brands? How does one find used ones that are reliable? Respond
to


Now that Minolta has gone out of the camera and scanner business, Nikon is
about the only game in town for new film scanners.

You may search Ebay for some used film scanners, but I would stay far, far
away from the Minolta Scan Dual IV scanners.

I have one dead in my closet.

There are some pretty good flatbed scanners with film scanning built in.
The Epson Perfection V700 and the V750 are often said to be as good as film
scanners.

I own a Canon Canoscan 8400F that does up to 120 Film, at a maximum
resolution of 3200 DPI.
8400F has be replaced by the Canoscan 8600F.

--
CSM1
http://www.carlmcmillan.com
--

"john" wrote in message
ups.com...
I want to scan a bunch of family slides. The Nikon 5000ED scanner with
the SF-210 auto slide feeder retails for about $1500. Are there no
other brands? How does one find used ones that are reliable? Respond
to


Well the Reflecta looks and works kind of like a slide projector. More info
he
http://www.ephotozine.com/article/Re...-DigitDia-3600

I found a few for sale att www.ebay.de

Richard

On Tue, 10 Jul 2007 16:21:58 -0700, john wrote:

I want to scan a bunch of family slides. The Nikon 5000ED scanner with
the SF-210 auto slide feeder retails for about $1500. Are there no
other brands? How does one find used ones that are reliable? Respond
to
The LS5000ED is a very good scanner. I've scanned well over 30,000
slides and negatives in the past couple of years and it's still going
strong. I'm not sure how many were slides and how many were negatives,
and film strips, but I'd guess a good 2/3rds were slides.

If you have a bunch of family slides and photos there are a number of
questions to ask before even starting. I'll ask a few and also point
you to http://www.rogerhalstead.com/scanning.htm . There's a lot of
information there and a lot of questions but it should help in making
some decisions.

The things to ask as what do you want to do with these images once the
slides are scanned? How do you plan on viewing them and how do you
plan on storing them?

If you want to save the images in the highest possible resolution so
they can be manipulated later on it's different than just saving them
to disk so they can be viewed on a computer screen. It also makes a
big difference in how much memory/ storage is going to be needed.
Here we are getting lucky as 500 gig (Half a terabyte) drives are now
just over a $100 USD. Full Terabyte drives are running about $350 to
$400 and they just came out. That of course is the reason the smaller
drives are getting so much cheaper. OTOH I still have a difficult
time thinking of a 500 gig drive a being small.

Images from slides scanned at 4000 dpi take up a lot of space. They
are roughly 60 megabytes at 8 bit color depth and twice that at about
128 megs at 16 bit color depth. that means it takes a DVD just to
store the equivalent of one roll of film. That can add up to a lot of
DVDs, a lot of time, and a relatively good method of cataloging them.
Of course you still need to sort and store the old slides.

Another couple of thoughts: we really don't know how long the DVDs
will remain viable storage. That is not only how long will they last
but how long will they remain a technology that is readily readable.
*PROBABLY* the technology will be around for another decade at least
but I emphasized the probably for a reason. Due to the sheer numbers
both CDs and DVDs will probably be around for a very long time, but I
make no guarantees.

Then you have both backing up and archiving the images. I back up my
data across a network so the images are on at least two computers. I
then burn them to *two* DVDs which gives me two complete sets of
archived data.

External HDs make good temporary storage and a good backup. they are
not reliable for long term storage but as has been said a good short
term back up is better than none. We are dealing with drives, tapes,
and DVDs (optical media) that are readily available and affordable to
the general public.

Good Luck,

Roger

www.rogerhalstead.com