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Scanner for 35mm and 16mm slides


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<p>There are a lot of scanner questions already, and I am working my way through the most promising ones, but I haven't found any so far that consider my particular needs.<br>

<br /> I have between 3000 and 4000 slides taken from the late 1940's to recently. They are family photos, just snapshots mostly. The vast majority are 35mm, but I have a few boxes of 16mm slides too. About half of the slides are Kodachrome and the rest Ektachrome. Some are in poor condition, dirty, marred by fingerprints, faded or with red-shifted colors, and many of them are over or under exposed. But a great many of them are still brilliant and beautiful. Most of the slide mounts are paper, and some are fairly ragged and beat up or swollen around the edges.<br>

<br /> I have two goals.<br>

<br /> 1) I want to scan all of them at a moderate quality level so they look good when viewed on a computer screen. I will archive the raw scans, and then convert and store them as jpegs on CD to distribute to my family for viewing.<br>

<br /> 2) I want to be able to rescan the best images, or the ones that my siblings ask for, at a high quality for archiving and printing up to 6x9 or perhaps 8x11 if the image warrants it and I can get a good enough scan.<br>

<br /> For the first goal, batched unattended operation would be a plus so that I don't have to individually attend to capturing each separate slide. I have seen scanners with magazine or carousel feeders, and I wonder how well these will handle damaged slide mounts. A scanner with ICE or similar capability that does a decent job of hiding dust and scratches and that does automatic color adjustment is another plus. I don't want to spend the scanning and editing time to optimize every image. I just want reasonably good and viewable scans.<br>

<br /> For the second objective, I don't mind putting some effort into getting a good scan and further cleaning up the capture in a photo editor. I'm not experienced in this, but I'm willing to learn.<br>

<br /> Non-essential extra capabilities that would be nice, so long as they don't compromise my primary goals, would be multi-format B&W and color negative and unmounted color transparency scanning (120 format, 4x5). But I suspect this may not be compatible with my first objective that may favor a dedicated 35mm film scanner.<br>

<br /> My budget is $2500, but I'd stretch it a bit for sufficient advantage.</p>

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<p>I am doing something similar and am using a Coolscan 5000. I haven't, however, splashed out for the SF-210 so am chugging away at 20 slides per night to keep it manageable. Only takes about 30 minutes while I watch TV or whatever. I also, however, have a lot of strip negatives and the 5000 is much faster processing those than slides.<br>

I suspect that a Coolscan 9000 might fit your bill. The main reason for suggesting that is that ICE works with Kodachrome on a 9000 and you really want ICE if you can get it; and you have so many Kodachromes. I am uncertain about how many slides you can scan at once using the holders and whether that qualifies as 'batch' for your purposes. A 9000 user might be able to chime in.<br>

Some comments/opinions based on my experience doing something similar with a 5000:<br>

1) Scan them once and scan them at maximum resolution. At least with the speed of the 5000 I don't think there is any meaningful time difference between, say, 2000dpi and 4000dpi. Storage is cheap. I'm scanning everything as 16-bit 4000dpi. I've got a 500GB drive and, even at 116MB per slide, there is enough space for over 4000 images.<br>

2) Life is too short not to use ICE. It is not a plus - it is an essential. (I have been scanning some B&W negatives where ICE doesn't work and the amount of spotting you would have to do will drive you insane.)<br>

3) Kodachrome and ICE don't play well with the 5000. Upside: the scan is faster because of no ICE. Downside: somewhat spotty. (If you are willing to spend time on an image, however, you can make ICE work with the 5000 though and it is much faster than manual spotting. I've heard it actually works properly on the 9000.)<br>

5) The 5000 will do anything 35mm out of the box. With the FH-3 you can also do smaller formats with a bit of fiddling (I've got some Minolta 16 negatives that work - but it really is too fiddly for the quality of the images unless they are irreplaceable).</p>

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<p>I've got a 9000 ED - it's carrier will hold 5 mounted slides at a time. I've never tried it, but I think it will do a batch scan of those 5. I agree with John though about just doing them once at high resolution. The time involved is mostly in fooling around with loading the carrier, poking it in the machine and waiting for it to grind around a while and then waiting for preview thumbnails to pop up. If you're going to wait through all that, you may as well just get thee maximum scan out of it.</p>

<p>But here's another idea - I've played with a flatbed scanner that a brother-in-law had with a carrier for doing maybe 20 slides at a time - I think it was a fairly recent model HP. Those scans turned out better than I expected, and it went pretty quickly. It might be worth $200 or whatever it is to do your first pass....</p>

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<p>I'd go with the Coolscan 5000 with the bulk slide adapter and drive it with Vuescan. Use the 8x multisampling feature to reduce noise and scan at max resolution so you don't have to scan twice (unless focus is off, the slide needs to be physically cleaned, etc). Use its IR cleaning feature on any slides that can take it (you'll want to test a few Kodachromes and see if you have edge artifacts or not). THe 9000ED may be better with IR cleaning and Kodachrome but it's intended to scan larger formats.</p>
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<p>If the 16mm slides are in 2x2" slide mounts, most scanners will handle them with a little massaging.</p>

<p>Otherwise, for this number of slides pay attention to the speed of scanning. I once thought I had more time than money for scanning and got a high-res slow one -- no body has that much time, and money spent for a faster scanner is worth every penny.</p>

<p>VueScan is a good recommendation for resurrecting older scanners. Virtually every scanner every made, it seems, is supported, and often works better than with the original software, even where that will still run...</p>

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<p>Thank you all for the responses so far. </p>

<p>The 16mm slides are in 2x2 inch mounts, so it's good to hear that most 35mm scanners will handle it. </p>

<p>I really like the feature set and the reviews of the Nikon Coolscan 9000. It doesn't sound very fast though. One review I found said it takes 7 minutes and 40 seconds to scan 5 slides with 4000 dpi with ICE, auto focus and auto exposure. I'm guessing that's a best case. That's 4.25 days of continuous scan time for 4000 slides scanned 5 at a time. But of course that doesn't factor in setup time for each group of 5 slides and whatever other work is needed to get the job done. Can any of you with real world experience doing slide scanning five at a time give me a more practical time, inclusive of all tasks involved to get finished but not edited scans? </p>

<p>Someone on Amazon dinged this scanner because he claims it is six year old technology. That doesn't bother me if it works. My 1955 Deardorff 8x10 is still my favorite camera. </p>

<p>The main problem I've read about with flatbed scanners is that they take more fiddling with the scans to get good quality. Is this true, or are there flatbeds that do a good job with ICE, auto focus and auto exposure, and minimal operator work?</p>

<p>JDM, I have an Nikon LS-4500 AF multi-format scanner. It's a old and slow 4x5 film scanner that also handles 35mm and 120 format. It doesn't have ICE, and the last drivers Nikon released for it were for Windows 98. I checked VueScan, and sadly this is not one of the supported scanners. Maybe that's a good thing since I expect it would take three years to scan 4000 slides with this old scanner.</p>

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<p>I'm not sure what kind of time you plan to devote to this project, but I have no illusions that my project will be quick. Reflecting that, I've set myself a slow and steady target. I have four boxes of slides with about 700 slides in each. I do 20 slides a night and should be finished by the middle of the year. This way I don't burn myself out and spend less than an hour a night doing it while I watch whatever is on TV. The slides have been in boxes for 30-40 years, they can wait a little longer.<br />Also, speed is relative. I believe flatbeds are even slower than dedicated film scanners at the kind of resolutions you need to use for 35mm slide scanning - it would only be the ability to batch 20 at once that might offset this.<br />One advantage of the 5000 is that you could get the SF-210 and churn through the slides. Even if it is not compeltely unattended because of potential jams, being able to step away from the computer and do other things means there is very little burden involved. (For example, I found it quite easy scanning 4-6 image negative strips because you can batch it up and only pay attention to the machine once every 15 minutes or so to change strips.)<br />If you do go the 9000 you could get an extra slide carrier. Load up one while you are waiting for the other to scan and then walk away for 5 minutes, lather, rinse, repeat. That would speed up the process a little.</p>
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<p>I like the idea of the SF-210 John, and I've also read that the 5000 is a little faster than the 9000. But half of my slides are Kodachromes, and the reviews of the 9000 suggest that it is the only scanner that does a good job with ICE dust/scratch removal on Kodachromes. It has a special setting for Kodachromes, according to the reviews. Apparently Kodachromes are tricky to scan and most scanners don't do a great job, from what I have been reading.</p>

<p>I don't plan to rush this project. If I could do it in half a year, that would suit me fine. </p>

<p>I wish there was something like the SF-210 for the 9000. If I decide to go with this scanner, I may by an extra slide carrier for those occasions when I can afford to devote a lot of dedicated time to scanning.</p>

<p> </p>

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