On Fri, 08 Oct 2004 17:31:23 +0100, Peter
wrote:

Hi All,

I've just found this NG... the subject is exactly what I am after.

I have about 3000 35mm slides, mostly kodachrome 25/64, ektachrome,
cibachrome and lately Fuji Provia. I would like to scan the lot, to a
standard which fully preserves the quality.

In 1999 I bought, for about £600, a Canon FS2710 slide scanner. This
is 2700dpi which in theory should give fantastic results compared to
any digital camera - but it doesn't. The uncompressed file format from
it (e.g. a BMP) is the right size for the res, about 25MB. But saving
it to a Jpeg yields an 800k file - much too small and comparable to a
2 megapixel camera. However if I scan direct into say Photoshop (and
then I get a 25MB file in there), save the file in PS at the highest
quality Jpeg setting it offers, and compare the resulting ~ 3MB file
(on screen, max zoom) with the 800k one which came straight from the
scanner's software, I can't see any difference. BOTH are pretty naff.

It is as if the scanner compressed to a jpeg on the transfer to the
PC! Even if going straight to an application.

The scanner went back to Canon very recently who charged me £150 for
replacing the scanner unit but nothing has changed.

The scanner had always been used for scanning low quality product pics
for a business website so its quality was never tested on outdoor
pics.

Most of my pics are landscapes and similar. Some of the pics are here

www.peter2000.co.uk/aviation/crete/crete.html

where those with the 'click to see a larger pic' option are scanned
slides. The colours are way off! The rest were taken with a Casio Z4
(4 megapixel) which is a tiny camera but is basically better than the
2700dpi Canon scanner!

The other thing is colour management. The scanned image is very dark.
I have to do (in PS)

Assign Colour Profile (choose the Canon 2710 profile)
Convert to Colour Profile (as above)

and that makes the image a lot better. But I don't see why these steps
should be necessary - the scanner software should just return the
"right" colour... Any colour management should be available for the
display device.

The software was developed before Windows 2000 which is what I am
running under, but it does the same under NT4.

Whatever is actually wrong with it, it is clear that this scanner
won't do for scanning slides which one might then want to dispose of
afterwards.

I've read some reviews of scanners and Nikon do one for about £3000
which is way too much. I contacted a lot of scanning bureaus and they
want a min of 50p a slide and one wanted £10 a slide, for scanning
them in oil, apparently!

A friend has another 3000 slides and we could put them all together...

I suppose what I want is two things:

1. a scanner which is really excellent and which I can rent for a
month or so

2. a scanner which is a lot better than the 1999 Canon...

I would really appreciate any suggestions...


Peter.

JPEG is a compressed format. The compressors remove detail in order to
compress further, most software allows you yo alter the "quality" of
the JPEG. I would scan to a BMP, and then use some photo processing
software to save as JPEG.

Some scanners scan at say 600 dpi, and then use come clever maths to
essentiall guess what is is the missing dots for 1200dpi, and then
claim to be 1200 dpi. I suggest you look for this feature when you
choose your scanner. this is a feature you probably don't want.

Rick