Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: > You're welcome. > > There is no truly "fast" way to scan negatives and transparencies while > still getting the best quality from them. The best I've been able to > come up with in 20 years of scanning practice are reasonably quick ways > to do a few scans of 35mm, or fewer of medium format, or a couple of > Polaroid prints, at high quality. > > For medium format, I've taken to using an old Leitz copystand device > coded the BEOON: it fits either my M-P or SL (with appropriate > adapter), a Leica M 50mm (or Micro-Nikkor 55mm with adapter) lens, and > lets me copy 35mm up to 6x9 film as fast as I can switch frames > underneath it, focus, and make an exposure, netting 24 Mpixel raw > captures to work with. Very rigid, very nicely made, rather specific to > either a Leica M bayonet or thread mount body. I used a Sony A7 with it > too, with an M -> A7 mount adapter. The results are excellent with > transparencies, but take time with both B&W and color negs to invert > and get the tonal scale right. I have several LR presets and custom > camera calibrations setup to help with it, but it's still time > consuming. > > For "thousands and thousands" of film exposures to scan, I'd just bite > the bullet and go to ScanCafe.com to have them all scanned at pro grade > resolution. They do an excellent job at a reasonable price, and with > that volume to scan, well, I'd rather work on culling and finish > rendering the scans than the tedious job of scanning. That's worth the > money to me; my time is more valuable than that.
You have answered a question I was about to ask about scanning other formats. I've been left, or have taken over the decades, a number of different film/slide formats to digitise. Each has their own issues, but the bulk are 35mm slides. You are right about the time to scan them and what it is worth. I have tried two companies in the UK in the past with 50 slides each to scan, and I wasn't happy with the results. I've found I need to look at each and decide its fate, and I generally conclude that most are worth scanning, either in part as a now historical family or local area matter, or I can use the images in some way in Elements for part of the image. As I'm not happy farming them out to be done, any way of making a good useable image and saving time is worth exploring, hence the interest in the new Pentax film duplicator. I have to say I think it's a lot of money for what it seems to be, but I can't imagine there is a huge market for this, all these years after the introduction of DSLRs. Numbers of slides: I have boxes which take 36 bags of approx 200 each, and I have at least 5 of them full....way more than I first thought, now I have them all in one storage system, such as it is.... More to think about, thanks Godfrey. Malcolm -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
