35mm slide to JPEG conversion

[think(box)]

Greetings to all,

May I ask for your opinions and help on 35mm slide conversion options?

Alan Lyons mentioned in another post "I still use slide film and a Minolta Dual Scan2 as a twain source." Although I have switched to digital, there are a lot of slides around needing rapid and very high quality conversion. I am considering doing the conversion myself, as opposed to using a paid conversion service.

I would like to find a device for sale that accurately projects 35mm slides and holds a digital still picture camera for slide image capture, preferably with the camera in macro image mode and closely spaced behind a projected image. Pointing my camera at a standard, large projection screen results in undesirable quality loss.

I want to use a DSC because it can capture a photo to perfection in 1 or 2 seconds, while a good scanner make take 15-20 seconds. I should be able to capture high quality pictures most rapidly with a high megapixel DSC.

Thanks in advance for your help on this

[Lloegyr]

Hi Think(box)

To get the best possible results you really have to use a dedicated film scanner. I have been using a Polaroid SprintScan 35 for many years (It originaly cost me £1500..$2500 some 5 years ago more than the computer!) Also I tend to scan everything at 2700 dpi that way I have a lot of lattitude later on to rework the images.

My feeling would be to agree with Alan and the Minolta is a good choice and they are well priced these days.

Mike

[Alan Lyons]

Bill,

I just sat down to lunch so I said I'll add my bit to this string.

If as you say you have a lot of slides around which you nee to scan then it would be worth your while to buy a film scanner. The chepest scanns I have found in Dublin work out at about 50c each, and are not always the best as labd tend to use a default setting. If your images fall outside the "normal" you can get some strange results sent back.

Copying from a screen has it's own set of problems i.e. contrast, exposure, ect. I would say to get your slides digitized, the home scanner is your best option. The Minolta Dual Scan will scan Slides, Colour negs, and Monochrome negs. The software alows you to do focus, exposure, and crop operations amoung others but you will find that most slides will be perfect with the auto settings.

You mention the difference between 2 and 20 sec. for camera and scan, but is this extra time what rainy afternoons and dark winter nights were made for,

Alan

[Ken Cox]

see canon at

http://www.imaging-resource.com/EVENTS/PMA.../982297549.html

got a buddy wants one so bad he is steppin on his tongue

pricey tho'

+-$1000 Canadian

[think(box)]

Thanks Mike, Alan, Ken - I'll study all of those devices and compare options.

If you're scanning at 2700dpi this means your image is (approx) 3600x2400 after scan for approx 34x23mm to stay inside rounded corners, right? This is helpful in that it is about 8.6 megapixels, and that you find this good for image rework purposes (no pixelation loss). A 5 megapixel image would be about 2000dpi and 2700x1800 pixels, or very close to same. A minor issue - do you scan to stay inside rounded corners, generally? And do you have lots of trouble with irregularly cut or inconsistently positioned slide windows?

I suspected what you found would be true, Alan, that color balance and other parameters will sometimes be off when you use paid services that don't have people doing individual scan visual checks. Some original images need help right from the initial scan settings.

And Ken - just got your reply. I'll check out the Canon as well. 4,000dpi and auto-fixup features - sounds good indeed. And that nice, little device has been around and in use for two years according to the web page. User feedback should be available and the price is not at first-issue levels.

Thanks!

[Alan Lyons]

Bill,

one thing I forgot was that the Minolta scans at 11mp which is far and away better than any affordable digital camera. Also, as scanners improve, you still can go back to your orignal slide which is better than both combined

Alan

[LumenLux]

This looks like a good place to try to turn my "two bits" into four bits. I use an older Minolta (Dimage Scan Dual).

I think it does ok - whatever that means . I have on occasion been pleasantly surprized with the results from an old slide that I wanted to revive and print. But Alan, your statement but you will find that most slides will be perfect with the auto settings. leaves me thinking I have a lot to learn. Maybe you can suggest a course of improvement for me to pursue because I usally find I have a tougher, much more time-consuming, task with a slide than I do with a new negative. Is your experience different than that? Maybe I just need to tap you for the settings you use, or maybe your newer Minolta is much improved hardware or software. Maybe you just know what you are doing. Like the proverbial plea for help with a PTE show - "what do you think I could be doing wrong?"

[Alan Lyons]

LumenLux,

I think in my case ignorance is bliss, or then agai it could be blind luck. I scaned a sequence I origonally had done on 2 slide projectors and as I had just aquired the scanner I pot every thing I could in the job sequence on auto i.e. focus, exposure ect. The only thing I had to adjust was the "sellect visable image area" as slide mounts do leave a double line around the image. I had the chance to show the sequence through a digital projector to a group of people who has seen the show before and they felt that it mached the original. I wonder if your problem with slides is in the camera? You need to slightly under expose the film to get good saturation. Try this, take a shot at the right exposure then 1 each at 1/4, 1/2 and 1 full stop under exposed. Then compare these and the one which gives the best saturation is where you set your meter for all future slides on thay brand of film. My camera is set at 1/4 stop under and the saturation is fine.

Only as a last resort do I read the instructions

Alan

[LumenLux]

Only as a last resort do I read the instructions

Alan

Maybe that's what I better do. I bet there were some with the scanner!

[ronwil]

Recently I upgraded from ME to XP only to find that drivers for my film and flat bed scanners were not available. So I invested in a Epson Perfection 3200 PHOTO scanner which combines both facilities. It can scan up to 6400 dpi and is priced at approximately £330 (UK). The two units which it replaces cost four time that amount. I have just completed scanning in over two hundred slides and am quite happy with the results. Have a look at the last four images in Gallery>Gallery Annexe of my Website.

Ron [uK]

[think(box)]

A humorous thread! Instructions?

Thanks Ron! Last fall I researched the scanner market for a friend and identified the Epson Perfection 3200 PHOTO scanner as the best, the one I would buy. User reviews rated it best as well. My present scanner is a 3-4 year old HP Scanjet 6200c (1200dpi). Picture scans are of very high quality, but the user interface is frustrating in that it unexplainably locks up for 2-3 minutes, then resumes working. It takes just as long to power down scanner, restart it and reestablish scan settings as it does to just wait it out when it locks. I have found other owners of HP 6200c who say they experience the same. HP offers no help so I just put up with it as I have since this scanner was brand new (just rechecked HP support site, only XP support has been added). The bottom line is that the HP costs too much of my time to operate for color slide scanning in volume.

Given that ongoing experience I have considered (during those 2-3 minute waits...) replacing the HP with that really nice Epson that you bought. Since you've used it to scan slides, one of my key concerns is how long it takes and how much trouble it is. The 3200 was rated about 16 seconds for larger scans, but I didn't gather any timing for 35mm slide scans. How does the average time work out for you, as in perhaps the 200 slides example you mentioned? Thanks!

[ronwil]

Sorry Bill. Not the sort of statistics I keep in my head, but I will do some dummy runs over the weekend and let you know the results.

Ron [uK]

[ronwil]

Bill

I have scanned in a slide using four different dpi settings and the results for the times of the scan were as follow:

1200 dpi 40 secs

2400 dpi 1 min 08 secs

3200 dpi 1 min 20 secs

6400 dpi 4 min

No perceptible difference with the on-monitor detail of each, but work such as cropping etc. takes infinitely lomger with the 6400 version. As a result I may be switching from a 3200 to the 1200 scan in future and may be lower, but I will wait to see how they project on my 6 foot screen.

Hope this information is what you want

Ron [uK]

[Guest guru]

Bill, the Epson flatbed solution can be a good choice. But be aware the scanning time of a 24 x 36 tranparency (at max resolution) is rather low, near 2 minutes, much more than any transparency scanner.

The image quality with transparent originals is very good (see http://www.normankoren.com/Tutorials/Epson...3200_Bruck.html, where you can see a brief comparison of the Epson 2450, 3200, HP S20, and CanoScan FS4000US), and the quality/price ratio is outstanding, if you think you'll have an excellent flatbed scanner that can allows to scan also medium size films up to 4 x 5".

However, the image quality is about the same you can reach with the Epson 2450, that cost less than the half. The main difference is the scan speed, much higher in 3200 (see again the same page quoted above).

[think(box)]

Thanks Ron - That is very helpful. I expect that 1200dpi will be where low resolution becomes a problem for the six-foot screen. As for scan times, I must be patient in scans, I guess I've found that nothing, even dedicated film scanners will do better than about 1 minute. The auto-feeders help a lot so that you can work on other things while the machine is busy, yet there is a lot of jam trouble. The advice on that is to use a credit card to reduce the slide opening thickness (width) - works very well. But dedicated devices and feeders together are as one user said, "on the wrong side of $1,000".

And thanks Guido for the link to Norman Koren's site. Norman has written some very helpful pages, including an excellent gamma and dark level setting tool that may be used with permission in P2E shows to help viewers set their monitor properly (I have a request in for permission now). And Norman provides a link to Petri Kekkonen's site where the slide dust removal feature and scan times are evaluated for the Canon FS4000US:

http://spaceweb.oulu.fi/~petri/canon_fs4000us.html

Petri has excellent illustrations of dust removal feature, before and after.

I am now getting a clear picture that the dedicated units may be the best choice, and of those Nikon is best for quality with Canon and Minolta second best. None seem to have the user interface quality of products made by Sony, and Sony doesn't appear to be in the film digitizing market.

Thanks go out to all for their very helpful feedback. Now I have the information I need to make a decision. I can't wait to see the super-quality P2E shows made from the many boxes of family slides.

[iceberg]

I am in the process of scanning slides from slide-based presentations to digital for digital projection. Using a dedicated 35mm scanner (Smartscan 2700), I scan at about 1800 ppi resolution which gives me a reasonable sized image file, then in Photoshop Elements crop to 1024x768 and save as a jpg. I have noticed on some scans (prior to cropping) an interference like patterning in the shadow areas. (It reminds me of Newton rings but there is no colour effect.) Changing the scanning resolution say to 1900 for a re-scan usually seems to do the trick but then other slides will then show the effect.

All the slides are in their original plastic mounts, not between glass.

I first noticed this effect on a now obsolete HP PhotSmart scanner so I am certain the fault is not with the present scanner. I have not noticed it on a Canon FS4000 but then it is used at higher resolution but is painfully slow.

Has anyone else observed this effect and found a way to avoid it?

[Maureen]

Hi Everyone and Slainte to Alan (and friends in Ireland)

We're great Canon fans (EOS 3 & 10D cameras) and the Canon dedicated film scanners. We started with the Canon 2700 which we thought was the bees knees until the Canon 2710 came on the scene - then we noticed the big difference (with some scan lines showing in certain images from the 2700 ).

Husband Robert is a big Mac fan (ie the computer not the burgers!) so he is still working with slide/sound sequences. This suits me as I can hog the PC and have the new CanoScan FS400 US connected and also the Epson Perfection 1640 SU. Must admit all are in constant use. Apart from AV we also produce prints so like to scan at the best resolution we can.

Always adjust any settings if you can in the scanner software (pays to read the book sometimes!). You will have a far superior result than if you wait and always do it in Photoshop. There is a technical explanation, but it's late here and my only brain cell has gone to sleep! We were taught to add a slight s curve in the curves setting in the scanner software and I usually check and tweak the levels if necessary BEFORE I scan to the computer. Obviously if you're doing lots it can pay you to adjust one slide and keep the settings - if the images were all taken at the same time etc. We're lucky to have a close friend who works professionally scanning for top agencies and gives us tips on getting the best out of our scanning equipment.

Like many friends I have thousands of old slides I need to scan if I'm to ever do all the digital sequences, etc I have planned and also convert some of my old slide/sound AVs.

Last week a very keen photographer friend of ours was discussing his experiments setting his Canon 10D digital camera on a tripod and shooting slides off his light box. He has an area taped up, so quickly drops the next slide into the rectangle and shoots lots of slides very quickly. He says he has produced very good results.

I have yet to find out what lens he used on the 10D camera and also to view his results.

It could be a very quick way of getting contact sheets done to catalogue slides and if the quality is not good enough, then scanning in the dedicated slide scanner. Maybe he really has had the excellent results he claims.

It is OK to scan at 1024px x 768px if you only needing the scans for projecting, - the FS4000 US has a setting especially for "scans for display". It will then scan much quicker and still produce the best quality for projecting. I know there are now some new digital projectors which are using 1280px x 1024px, so it may be wise to start thinking about scanning to these sizes. Images will always look OK interpolated down on a big screen but will depreciate in quality if they have to adjust up in size.

Scans for printing need to be as large a file size as possible (assuming you are going to produce large prints).

Always take your slides out of glass mounts to scan.

Hope this helps.

BW Maureen

PS Am feeling much better & CDs in the post tomorrow guys!

[alrobin]

Maureen,

Glad to have you back with us, and happy to hear you are feeling better again.

I, too have many old slides which I am trying to scan (before the bacteria and mould on them makes them totally unusable :-((( )

I use an older professional Agfa Duoscan transparency/flatbed scanner, which lets me scan 20 slides at a time at up to 4000 x 4000 dpi (interpolated). Makes things go much quicker as I can also set a batch control so I don't have to preview them all each time.

All the best!