When my father died in 2008, I bought a $500 Epson flatbed scanner and scanned a pile of photographs to prepare for the memorial service. It took a long time and was tedious, but I got some good results. The black and white prints scanned at pretty high quality, good enough that I could make out business names in tiny features in the post-war German-processed prints. Color prints tended to be pretty muddy. I had access to some of the negatives, and with the transparency-configuration they tended to be better, although color correcting them to look natural was also tedious. Scanning slides was *super* tedious. The scanner came with a jig to hold a dozen slides at a time, but getting the slides into and out of the frame was very slow, manually framing each slide was very slow, and the whole slide process was not practical for bulk processing.
In the grand PLUG tradition of answering a different question than asked: as for slides, I had about 3000 slides "scanned" in an afternoon at a Seattle hackerspace. The slides were in a carousel trays, and a clever person there had modified a carousel projector to backlight the slides with a lower power lamp and a piece of frosted glass, they removed the projector lens, and aimed a high-pixel digital SLR with macro lens at the slides, and then, with a little electronics, auto advanced the slides and auto-actuated the shutter release. You could set up a 140-slide tray, and start it off, and 90 seconds later or so, you'd have the whole tray done. We sat and chatted enjoyably as the machine did the work, and after a few hours the whole stack of trays was complete. The most significant flaw in the process was that the macro lens we were using did not auto-focus, and due to variations in the slide-holding frame thickness, about a third of the slides are very slightly out of focus. There was also a slight problem with the frame being rotated a few degrees. I have been meaning, some day, to set up a similar rig with an autofocus macro lens and repeat the process more carefully. Here's an example of the results we got: https://photos.app.goo.gl/x8Xp4xeTXahtLMku8 There are services that will scan your slides for you, almost certainly using some kind of mechanized system like the hacker space guy used, but they involve shipping them across the country and frankly I don't trust that process with the original slides I could never get back again if lost or damaged. -- Russell Senior [email protected] On Sun, Jul 4, 2021 at 8:53 AM Galen Seitz <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > > I'm interested in hearing people's experiences scanning their photos. > We have a large collection of old prints of various sizes, both B&W and > color that we would like to digitize. I checked the mailing list > archives and was surprised that I couldn't find any previous discussion > of this. My product searches all seem to lead to the Epson FastFoto > FF-680W. This is a $600 photo scanner that can scan a stack of prints > at 3 seconds per print. Despite the high price and apparently > Windows-only software, this seems to be the best choice for bulk > scanning photos. Does anyone have experience with this product or a > similar product? > > BTW, in the future there may be a need to digitize slides, but for the > time being my focus is on prints. > > thanks, > galen > -- > Galen Seitz > [email protected]
