Best resolution

[pwear]

I'm sure this has been discussed elsewhere, so I probably only need a redirection. I want to build some fairly simple PTE shows from my slide collection. This means I have a mountain of slides to scan, about twenty years worth, and my scanner speed is very dependant on the resolution I choose. Any opinions as to a reasonable balance between the flexibility of 2900 dpi (my maximum) and the speed/ease of something closer to a screen res of 1024 X 768 (which I use as my computer default)?

Trying to look to the future, I'm guessing the shows I make will need to satisfy likely increases in computer screen res, and high definition TV. I'm sure other folks have pondered this question and your thoughts, as always on this great forum, would be most appreciated.

Peter

[Conflow]

Hi Peter,

This might be a practical solution which I done some time ago. I had some very old 'Slides' from a Holiday

in the Bahamas going back 15 years, these were irreplacable, and like you I found out the hard way that

modern 'Scanners' (with Slide Scan Utility) take for ever to scan one Slide never mind 160 of them.

Oliver and John, two Professional Photographer friends and I got together and after some serious 'head bashing' we came up with this novel idea....which worked a charm !

We 'borrowed' an old 3M-Carosel Projector and Silvered Screen ~ then loaded in 36 Slides into the Carosel and projected these to a size of 6.ft x 4.5.ft then set up a Pro-Fuji Digital Camera and took the lot, all 5 Carosels worth ~ some 160 slides allowing for "duds".

* The Camera had been set for 'apeture' not speed and I think Oliver used a Neutral Filter.

* The resolution was set for 1.0 mB per shot (in consideration of the slide quality).

* The 3M Projector was great at correcting small Focus errors on the origional Slides.

We downloaded the lot into the PC and used 'Foto Filtre Program' to revive the Colours and 'JPeg Crops' to resize to 1024x768.

All of us were rather amazed with the results, I personally was flabbergasted at the quality !

The 'Projector Time' and download process was LESS than a hour ~ Editing of course took longer.

Hope this might give you some ideas.....

Brian.Conflow.

[alrobin]

Peter,

Welcome to the Forum!

If you end up using a film scanner for the job, use the highest resolution you can conveniently afford to use, in terms of time spent. You can always resize down, but rarely up, at least effectively. 2000 dpi is sufficient for 1024 x 768 digital images for PTE, but it doesn't leave much room for cropping.

I am embarking on a similar task, with about the same number of slides to deal with, but I would like to maintain maximum quality. Brian's method is interesting, and I may end up using it for the bulk of my slides, too. However, I have an old Agfa 1200 dual-mode scanner, with a flat slid-out window which holds 20 slides. It can be operated in "batch" mode to automatically scan all 20, one by one, once the program has been set up, and provided all slides are set up in the same position each time (not too difficult as they are all side-by-side). This speeds up the process considerably. Good luck with your project - let us know how you make out!

[bmccammon]

I won't answer your original question but I will offer another "solution" to mass slide "scanning". You can buy a slide copier adapter for virtually any digital camera. I had a Nikon 995 and used an inexpensive attachment that served as a slide stage and light diffuser. I copied over 1000 slides in a weekend and came out with JPG files that rival flatbed scanning. Granted, scanning with a dedicated slide scanner provides the best result but I didn't have the time or resources to pursue that. I'd surely look into direct re-photography of the slides along with the projection method recommended by Conflow. Either are a compromise to the dedicated slide scanner but I think that 're-photography' of the original slide produces great results. Good luck.

[Johnwnjr]

The other replies are all valid but I would add that I have used both a Minolta Dual II Scanner and an Epson Perfection 4990 Photo Flatbed Scanner, as well as photographing the screen, and the Epson produced the best results. This scans a load of 8 slides at a time and saves much time in editing as it removes most of the dust on the slides. The last ones I did were taken on Kodachrome 64 in 1975 and they have reproduced beautifully without removing the glass, but cleaning the glasses as they are put on the scanner. The Minolta did the job very slowly and each slide needed a lot of editing. The Photographing the screen worked but did reproduce the slides so well.

With regard to resolution I scanned these as high as the scanner allows and then reduced them to 1024 x 768 for Pictures to Exe. Ian Bateman has written an article in the current AV News were he suggests doubling up the number of pixels to be future proof for screens and projectors.

John

[pwear]

Many thanks to those who replied with their ideas. I'll think about them all.

I guess that scanning to maximum resolution gives advantages when manipulating images in PTE. I started off doing most of my anticipated resizing in Photoshop, down to my screen res, but so much creativity available at the PTE stage is lost if you "run out of resolution" on a tight zoom or somesuch. It's always possible to rescan, but that begins to defeat the point of trying to timesave from the word go.

This is a nice community, my thanks again.

Peter