UKC

Happy Easter everyone.

I've got a whole load of negatives and slides, some of them mine and some from my fathers trip to Antarctica and his other travels. As professional scanners (4000dpi+) are eye wateringly expensive I'm looking for a hire company. Can anyone recommend a good one that might be able to help, preferably in the Bristol or Southampton area.

Thanks

In reply to The_flying_climber:

Bump

In reply to The_flying_climber:

I have a Nikon Coolscan 5000, which does an excellent job, but is no longer available. You may be able to get one second-hand. The Coolscan is great, but it is very slow work - one slide at a time, not a batch processor at all.

In reply to John Stainforth:

Thanks John

Not worried about how long its going to take, quality and resolution are the main priority for me. Will have a look at second hand but I think it will be a very pricey option for what will be a one off exercise.

Depending on how many slides you have, and what you are going to do with them, a slide scanner may not be the main option. It can easily take several minutes/slide, excluding putting them in/out of the scanner. Once you get to a few hundred films this becomes an untenable amount of time. Especially as you probably don't need all the slides to be maximum resolution, e.g. if they're going online.

Instead if you already have a DSLR an alternative is a tripod, light box, and macro lens. Use this to take photos of the slides - and if you can tether the DSLR to a computer and use live view you can check the focus and cropping for every photo, and transfer them to the computer all in one go. This increases the slide scan time to 5-10 secs/slide.

You can always go back and scan particular slides at a high resolution later if you need to.

This is what I do now - I started using my scanner but then stepped back and worked out that the sheer time to scan my existing slides was not practical.

In reply to David Barlow:

Thanks for this, have you got any examples of the results you get?

In reply to The_flying_climber:

HI, my wife had several hundred slides and negatives she wanted scanned, so we bought a film and slide digital scanner from Maplins. Each slide took about a second to scan nd the results were very good.I can't remember the cost but I believe it was under £50.
Might be an option for you.

In reply to The_flying_climber:

I've sent you an email with more details. See https://www.dropbox.com/sh/wa2vp6tc7kxc13v/dPxx8DBykw

David.