Negative Scanner choices

[Magenta Sunset]

question for all you camera buffs.
i want to get a negtive/slide scanner to save all my old photos.
Do you have any recommendations?
thanks.

[Mighty306]

Hey Magenta.  I guess the question is what's your budget?  Me & my Dad bought a slide scanner to start digitising his hundreds (maybe thousands) of slides in the last year or two of his life.  That was about 13 years ago.  I still have it and will hang on to it as keep toying with the idea of getting back in to film photography.

That was a Minolta Dimage 5400 professional level scanner.  You can still pick them up second hand on eBay, along with the equivalent Nikon offerings.  They're a couple of hundred quid though.  The real disadvantage, however, is scanning speed - it was a desperately time-consuming process, especially if you applied the dust & scratch removal algorithm in the software. (Each one could take several minutes).  The software wasn't very intuitive either & needs tweaking to make it run on Windows 7 as it was written for XP back in the day. The Minolta would produce huge files at full resolution (5400 dpi) of stunning quality from a high quality slide though.

After the old man died I still had boxes of slides & negs to scan.  Problem is it's pretty difficult to tell if they're worth doing at high quality until you actually do them.  Tbh you'll find many of them weren't worth the effort.  I ended up buying a really cheap little scanner from 7DayShop in about 2010 with scanning speed in mind.  In fact that one isn't strictly a scanner.  It backlights the slide/neg & then just snaps a photo of it.  It's definitely not a quality scanner but the images are OK for display at typical laptop screen resolution.  Try zooming in and you'll notice its weaknesses.  I rattled through a load of 'scans' in no time though.  I think it's this one (it only cost me about £30 at the time though) https://www.7dayshop.com/slide-negative-...-sdhc-card

Sooo, when it comes to dedicated film scanners the trade off is between low cost/quick/lower quality and high cost/slow/high quality scans.  On the high quality end the Plustek's are meant to be good, but prices are from £200 up.  As I said, second hand Minolta or Nikon scanners pop up on auction sites sometimes but you would have to make sure the holders are in good condition as you can't feed films through the scanner without them.  For some reason they sold the 'professional' scanners for many hundreds of pounds & then supplied them with ridiculously flimsy plastic holders.  Also, you may not be easily able to run the software on a newer computer.

The other option is a flatbed scanner with film scanning options.  A friend has used a flatbed to scan a lot of her images (from art school years back).  She was happy with the results but that's as much as I know.

After all that I'm not sure I've helped much as I haven't really made a recommendation, other than if you don't want to dedicate weeks to scanning then go for something like the 7DayShop option.  If you want to scan some of them at higher resolution later & have the budget you could then invest in something that can give you high resolution scans.  I can email you some samples from the 7DayShop scanner & the Minolta scanner if you PM me your email address.

[Magenta Sunset]

high buddy, that's very informative! much appreciated
all I've seen so far are the ones that crop up in booklets like "Coopers of Stortford".
I would go for an ebay jobby, but 1, i'm not that motivated to spend a 'lifetime' at it. and 2, I've just laid out for a newish (ie, win7-10) machine to replace my busted one.
I've about 2-300 films lurking somewhere, that i'd like to be able to preview, then pick out the best ones.
i'll pm in a mo'

[Eeyore]

I said this on fb but ill say it on here for completeness. Check amazon and look at the reviews!

[Magenta Sunset]

I will tonight

[Mighty306]

I said this on fb but ill say it on here for completeness. Check amazon and look at the reviews!

That's a good call Eeyore.  What you don't often get on Amazon though is comparative reviews.