On 2010-12-29, Brian Lawson wrote:
Hey Gunner,

The threads here reminded me I needed to do a few (thousand) slides,
as they are starting to get mould. So today I bought a gadget that
was on sale at Staples for 59.92. Bar Code # 893811002642.

It's made by Innovative Technology (says " i t " in a circle on the
box ), and it's a Film & Slide Converter. Does 35MM slide, 35MM
colour roll negatives, and 35MM black & white roll negatives. Works
OK, but time consuming. Holds 4 slides at a time, and can suck the
data into its own memory, or a SD card, and then dumps either one
easily into the computer. Gonna be slow, but works well.

It took me a while to find a web site with any information about
this scanner. No precise details about the dpi resolution, but the
MegaPixels figure suggests that it is nowhere near the Nikon scanner in
resolution. (That one will scan with high enough resolution so you get
into grain before you get into pixel artifacts with 64 ASA Ektachrome.)

I have two Nikon scanners which give the same resolution. The
older one runs quite hot (why the later ones are called "Coolscan") and
only talks IEEE-488 interface (GPIB or HPIB) or RS-232 serial port.
Needless to say -- the RS-232 is a killer in transfer time with a
resolution which gets you 72 MB per full slide scan when going to
uncompressed TIF format (better to avoid JPEG/JPG until you are through
modifying the image, because you lose detail every time you save a .jpg
image. Good image processing programs (like PhotoShop and "the GIMP")
have their own internal formats to preserve as much detail as possible
during the processing.

The later Nikon Scanner (the "Super CoolScan 5000 ED" uses USB
and has software for either Windows or Mac's OS-X.) The earlier one
(the LS-3500) had software only for Windows -- but the Mac was not
really worth considering at the time -- pre OS-X.

The (IT) scanner appears to use USB interface, and I see no
hints that it will work with anything other than Windows. (They just
say "coverting slides to PCs." :-)

They had a slightly bigger and slightly more expensive one that will
scan photographs as well, but I have a flat bed that will do that
quite nicely already.

By the way, it's the KodaColour slides that are getting bad.
KodaChrome and Ektachrome seems fine so far.

Interesting. I was having mould spots growing on glass-mounted
Ektachrome -- with the glass mounting supposed to have been to *protect*
the slides all those years ago. :-) (Of course, these were home
processed slides, without the protective lacquer the commercial labs
used.)

AnscoChrome has some strange drift in color over the years.
DynaChrome started out a little weird, but was more like Kodachrome
overall.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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