Film/Negative scanner

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koffiejunkie

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Hi guys,

Having figured out the solution to my iPhoto problem I'm ready for the next stage: to get all my photos into iPhoto.

My digitally taken pictures are easy, since they are already sorted neatly into folders and sorted by date/event, but I have a large collection of pictures taken on good old 35mm (and 110 before that) film. As I have always preferred my prints to be on matt, scanning the photos yield less than desirable results.

Can anyone make a recommendation for a good scanner to use to scan negatives (and associated software to convert it to normal colour)? Requirements:

1. Has to work on a PPC Mac
2. Give me good resolution - 8MP-ish or more (for the size of the film, not for an A4) would be good.
3. Preferably have some sort of mechanism to put the film down properly on the scanner since many of my negatives are bought from photographers at events and as a result are single images.
4. This is not essential, since I have only a handful of slide films and can have these done, but the ability to scan slides would be great because once I'm done with my negatives I can pass the scanner on to my dad, who has a huge library of slides.

Thanks

EDIT: I do have Photoshop, so the software is not essential but it would be nice if the scanner took care of image conversion on the fly.
 
Last edited:
I am looking for something similar. Will watch here for replies.
 
I have the Cannon Canoscan 4200F. The bigger/later cannon brothers is even better I believe. Nice hardware and software functions, like scan directly to PDF, e-mail, etc. Does have a negative reader/holder as standard .
 
neio, thanks for the links. I have seen some of them already, but will go through the rest tonight at home. I just thought that since we have a few Mac using photographers among us, someone here would have first-hand experience too.

Thanks
 
koffiejunkie said:
neio, thanks for the links. I have seen some of them already, but will go through the rest tonight at home. I just thought that since we have a few Mac using photographers among us, someone here would have first-hand experience too.

Thanks
Click to expand...
All my old negatives are in a storage locker in the states . . . maybe I'll get around to scanning them in one of these days. :)
 
bwana said:
All my old negatives are in a storage locker in the states . . . maybe I'll get around to scanning them in one of these days. :)
Click to expand...

Ha ha bwana, I had exactly the same situation. My negatives was in a crate in my old house in S.A. Was there last week, thought I'd take it to the same place I used to do my scanning at, but they did such a lousy job (looks like they printed it first on matt paper and then scanned it - came out all grainy) I decided it's better to get a decent scanner and do it myself.

I bought all my negatives with me - they're not too many, about half a lever arch file full. Still need to figure out a safe but cost-effective way to get the rest of my stuff over here...
 
A touch expensive. I think I might opt for the Canon 4400F - unless there are serious problems with it.

Thanks for all who replied
 
OK, so I bought the 4400F and it scans really nicely. But the included software is awful and slow as a dog on my Mini. Is there a way to scan directly from Photoshop?
 
koffiejunkie said:
OK, so I bought the 4400F and it scans really nicely. But the included software is awful and slow as a dog on my Mini. Is there a way to scan directly from Photoshop?
Click to expand...

I can confirm that the software is a bit crappish.
Got the same scanner.

Scanning quality is great and takes a while to scan a whole photo album.
But I tell myself that I only need to do it once.:)


On the CanoScan toolbox, there's a "Photo-1" tab.
At the bottom there is a place where u can choose an external program.
 
^^^

I just got my Canon 4400F as well, Same as above, great scanning quality.
 
I thought about replacing my old agfa scanwise a while back but I use it so infrequently that I keep forgetting about the grating grinding squealing noise it makes when it starts up. :o
 
alf101 said:
I can confirm that the software is a bit crappish.
Got the same scanner.

Scanning quality is great and takes a while to scan a whole photo album.
But I tell myself that I only need to do it once.:)


On the CanoScan toolbox, there's a "Photo-1" tab.
At the bottom there is a place where u can choose an external program.
Click to expand...

Actually I have to disagree,having putt multiple photo's on the flatbed and scan, the software automatically separates the photo's into a picture each.

The OCR is nice as well.
 
neio said:
Actually I have to disagree,having putt multiple photo's on the flatbed and scan, the software automatically separates the photo's into a picture each.

The OCR is nice as well.
Click to expand...

How do u do that?
i just scan the whole page from the photo album with the plastic cover still on. Still looks good.
 
PM me your e-mail addie and I'll send you screen shots.
 
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