How to Scan Photographs, Negatives and Slides

If you have a few old negatives or photos you want to get in digital form on your computer, then the best bet would be to take them or send them away to a specialist to scan them and put them onto a disk for you, but if you have a lot, or are still using film cameras (I am some of the time) then you may want to get a slide or film scanner.

There isn't much choice, now, because most people have moved to digital cameras, but there are some excellent second hand ones around, and some very inexpensive, but very high quality scanners available.

It is also possible to scan negatives using a flat-bed scanner, but the results will not be as good as a proper slide/film scanner. Flat-bed scanners are however excellent for scanning photos if you don't have the negatives.

I bought this scanner in 2007. It seemed too good to be true. Good quality scanners from companies such as Nikon and Canon etc. had always been very expensive, costing several hundred pounds and yet have lower resolution (dots per inch) than this remarkably inexpensive device (I paid about £150 - $300 and I have seen it even cheaper in Jessops although they no longer seem to stock it) At this price level of course there has to be some compromise, and this is build-quality. It really is quite light-weight and flimsy in construction and the slides or negative strips have to be manually clicked through the device in their rather cheaply constructed mounts. No motorised transport here.

The software provided was only available for PC (I mostly use Apple iMacs and Macbooks, but I do have a PC as well) and is easy to use and install, but was quite prone to crashing causing me to have to restart the PC a few times, but the speed was fantastic. My old Canon FS-4000US scanner is so slow taking 10 minutes per full-resolution scan, the Plustek takes a minute. In fact I spent more time fiddling with the slides putting them into the mount than actually scanning. The resulting scans, while slightly noisier than other lower-resolution scanners I have used are wonderfully high resolution. Colours are also perhaps more subdued than the Canon, but of course, a few adjustments in Photoshop or Gimp soon fixes that (see section on photo-editing software)

The bad news however is that it turned out to be unreliable, occasionally making some very strange noises and stopping completely (turning off the power usually fixed it) I returned it and got my money back in full, although would have been happy to get another one, as the speed and quality were so good.

Would I recommend this scanner? At this price I probably would if you only want to scan a few of your favourite negatives or slides, but not if you are a professional. I am a very heavy user archiving my full back catalogue of 20+ years of wildlife and travel photography. I've gone back to my trusty old Canon scanner.

Summary: Very inexpensive, good image quality, but only for light to medium use

Advantages: Very high resolution

Disadvantages: Slightly cheap build quality

When I bought this scanner a few years ago it was quite expensive at more than £700 although at the time scanners of this resolution were in general even more expensive. It is quite an old design and most likely now to be found only on the second-hand market, but due to it's sturdy construction could make a sensible second-hand purchase when compared to the relatively cheap and cheerful scanners available now.

It is very robust and fairly large with approximately a 35cm x 10cm footprint to accommodate the full length of the film holders, but the build quality of mine has stood the test of time and it is still working after scanning about 500 films (I am gradually archiving my wildlife and travel photographs from more than 20 years of adventures) It is equipped with two sturdy metal film holders: one that takes strips of up to 6 35mm negatives and the other takes 4 mounted slides. The scanner detects which one is being used and sets the default scanning settings accordingly (although if you use unmounted slides in strips it assumes you are using negatives). There is also an APS film feeder that can be attached to the front and allows whole APS films to be scanned.

The scanner comes with scanning software: a copy of photoshop LE 5.0 (a cut-down version of Photoshop, but more than adequate for general photo retouching, level adjustment, curves etc.) for post-processing of the scanned data and a photoshop "plug-in" called FilmGetFS 1.0, for controlling the scanner. I use an Apple imac and the only way to use the scanner is with this plug-in (although there are other programs for PCs which can be used instead) This means that photoshop is not available for use while the scanner is running. The run- time for a full-resolution (4000 dpi, 140MB) scan is more than 10 minutes per slide, so in excess of an hour for 6 negatives. This is very slow compared to some of the competition, partly due to the use of USB 1.0, but partly just because it's a slow scanner. Alternatively the fast SCSI interface may be used, which improves things a bit. Another limitation is that each scan is not saved to disk automatically after completion but just left open on the screen, so if you run out of memory and the application crashes you could lose hours of work unless you save regularly e.g. between batches of 6. Each time you come out of the scanning application, then restart, a calibration is run on the scanner which takes a random amount of time somewhere between five seconds and five minutes (I have found no obvious reason for this) There is also dirt and scratch reduction software included called FARE (Film Automatic Retouching and Enhancement) which can be run during the scan which slows things down even more and for full resolution scans uses a huge amount of memory, but does however give very useful results.

The software and scanner are easy to install and use with the option of previewing a scan and cropping, rotating and some other adjustment before the actual full scan is performed.

The results are extremely good both in terms of the actual resolution and sharpness of the resulting image, but also the colours which are vibrant and realistic. The maximum colour-depth is 42 bits which adds flexibility although many applications and file formats do not support this (e.g. JPEG) so 24 bit output can be used to save space and time. Resolution can also be reduced to 2000 dpi,1000 dpi or lower to really speed things up. Dropping the resolution and colour-depth gives very reasonable scan-times even as low as a minute or less for the lower resolution setting, at the expense of quality, although there is still that random calibration step to slow you down.

I would certainly recommend this scanner. There are higher resolution scanners around, but then who really needs more than 60 Mega-pixels? The relatively slow scan-rate is the only real issue with this scanner.

Summary: A good sturdy reliable work-horse with good quality output

Advantages: Very good quality scans

Disadvantages: Slow