DIYbanter - Slide Negative scanners?

On 2010-12-21, Brian Lawson wrote:
On Tue, 21 Dec 2010 09:06:29 -0600, spaco
wrote:

SNIP
If you want to know more, email me offline.

Pete Stanaitis
--------------

Hey Pete,

I'm the interested proud owner of a few thousand 35mm slides that are
going mouldy, so post it all here please. Better than all the
political and ideological "really-fun-for-all-us-metalworkers" banter
that gets carried all the time. Change is as good as a rest, maybe?

I didn't see the original article (Perhaps it fell victim to a
killfile? Perhaps it fell victim to a problem in net propagation.)

However, I spent about six months scanning a bunch of rolls of
slides. I used a scanner made by Nikon -- and now apparently
discontinued. It has both a holder which will accept a single mounted
slide at a time, one to six unmounted slides or negatives in a holder
(scan three then turn it around), or (with a different plug-in holder) a
strip of six negatives or unmounted slides which it can read all in with
a pre-scan, then you adjust the parameters on a slide-by-slide basis,
and then tell it to go do the serious scan of the whole batch.

There is another holder (which I don't have) which accepts a
roll of up to 40 slides or negatives to treat the same way as the
6-negative strip. This added enough to the cost so I skipped it. (It
also has a stack loader which will hold a number of mounted slides,
which I also don't have experience with, because a lot of my slides are
glass mounted and too thick for the stack loader.

It has software to run it only on Windows or Macs. The Mac
software runs on OS-X 10.4 and earlier, and I believe on OS-9 as well.
The Windows software is a little newer, but I did not use it. There are
no drivers for the unix/linux SANE scanner driver. It connects to the
system via USB, and you *really* want USB 2.0 or you will be waiting
forever for each scan. A scan to TIF format produces about a 72 MB file
from each slide. B&W negatives are about a third the size, but still
pretty large.

The name of the scanner which I am describing is "Super CoolScan
5000 ED" -- if you find a local store which still has one in stock, or
want to hunt via eBay. (They also have a 2-1/4" square scanner, FWIW.)

Things hang up occasionally, so you have to power cycle the
scanner -- at least with OS-X 10.4.

But plan to spend *months* at this. It took me about two months
for 3338 slides. (If you plan to do it *right* -- adjusting the color
balance, gamma, and endpoints to get the maximum out of each slide. If
many are in good shape and you were quite consistent with exposure, you
may want to re-tune once for each roll. And certainly re-tune when you
change brands or types of film -- even the difference between various
Kodachrome or various Ektrachrome speeds calls for re-tuning to do it
right.

Expect to scan a few rolls and throw away the scanned images as
you go back to them after learning the various tricks to make them look
better. By working at it, I actually got at least recognizable images
from slides which were solid black to the eye or the projector.

I sent the color scans to family last Christmas, and spent a
good part of this year processing the B&W negatives from the same
period.

Good Luck,
DoN.

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