On 25/09/2015 21:44, NY wrote:
"dennis@home" wrote in message
web.com...
I did send one film off to somewhere that returned a CD of digitised
negatives but they were a pathetic 25k byte jpegs when they came back
so that was a waste of time and money.

You're kidding! What a load of morons!

I scanned the ~6,000 negatives I have myself and that took months of
part time effort.

I bet it did. As a matter of interest, what scanner and software do you
use? I have a Minolta Scan Elite II and I use VueScan. I ought to try
again to install Minolta's own software on Windows 7, because I seem to
remember I got better results with it than VueScan, but that was back in
the days of XP where it installed properly.

Thats a good question, its been in the atic for about three years now,
IIRC it s a HP scanjet 4800 flatbed with a full sized coldcathode lamp
in the lid.
It will do five strips of 35 mm at a tie or a 10x8 plate if I had one.

Its not very quick but it does good scans at 16 bits per channel and
2400 dpi.


I can get good results from slides - even from very overexposed ones
from Mum and Dad's honeymoon (they probably had other things on their
mind!) and likewise some very overexposed ones I took at night time of
illuminated buildings, when I guessed the exposure wrongly.

However I have great difficulty getting realistic ones from colour negs:
they tend to look low-contrast and rather artificial. The best way of
describing them is like colour photos in a book from the 1940s or 50s.
I've tried different settings for film manufacturer and type, as well as
tweaking other variables. Also there is a coarse net curtain effect
overlaying the results, as if the film grain is exceptionally coarse. I
seem to need wildly different exposure and colour balance settings for
every frame from the same strip of negatives.

Sometimes I get very good results and can bring out highlight and shadow
detail that is missing from the prints that the photo shop made, but
it's very hit or miss.

I didn't have much in the way of problems like that but I suspect it was
the 16 bit depth that helped.