35mm Film Negatives to CD - Where to go?

[BaronTT]

I've been thinking of transferring about 10 years' worth of 35mm photos to CD. Using the negatives is probably the best way to do it.

 

Any idea of a place that would do a big job like this? The cost?

 

One alternative is to use a home scanner with a film adapter, but that seems very tedius to me.

 

Any ideas?

[Nervous_Dog]

At our local photo shop in Soi Aree, they do this when you get photos prnted, maybe if you came in with a ton they'd do it for the right price, 1 baht a pic???

 

No idea, 3 baht to print though

 

DOG

[Encore]

>At our local photo shop in Soi Aree, they do this when you get photos prnted, maybe if you came in with a ton they'd do it for the right price, 1 baht a pic???<

 

Depends what quality you want. The routine scan before printing usually produces low res files, which look terrible if you want to ever print of them again. For a reasonable result, you want at least a file of a few mb per neg, for really good enlargements, maybe 20-40 Mb per neg. That can be slow and very costly.

 

For just showing the images on a standard computer screen it is less critical.

 

For very high quality scans, a place in Silom, a few doors down from thai Airways, in direction Chong Nonsi BTS, don't know the name.

[BaronTT]

I don't need a lossless TIFF or RAW. If I never need to do a blow-up, I could use the original negatives.

 

Probably med-rez, say JPGs at 1-2MB per photo.

[ALHOLK]

Hi!

 

I have a Canon scanner with an adaptor for negatives. Although good enough for displaying images on a computer the resolution is quite poor and printing from the scans would not produce an acceptable result. The alternatives would be to let a professional do it or by a dedicated film scanner and as you said this is very tesious work even with a cheap scanner like mine.

 

regards

 

ALHOLK

[dddave]

I just put some thought and research into this issue a few months ago when I was in the US. I have about 5,000 slides that I never view taking up a huge amount of space in the Carossel trays, and about 10,000 b+w negatives. There are professonal services where you can send slides or negatives and they will scan them using high quality scanners and put them on disk. This however does not come cheap, about .25 an image on up.

 

A decent dedicated scanner can be purchased for (US) $400 on up to close to $2000, scaning speed and film handling options being defining criteria. Though expensive, if one has the time (say, someone staying with a gf in Issan, with nothing to do but watch the rice grow) a less expensive machine could be bought, used for the project, then probably sold for fairly close to the purchase price. A lot of people with big slide collections have got to be thinking about this.

 

David

[BaronTT]

I've tentatively decided to buy a relatively high end flatbed "Photo" scanner, which has the adapters built-in for negatives. Not a dedicated film scanner.

 

I'll do the scanning in my spare time over the next year or so. Perhaps pay my teen daughter to do some in order for her to get some cash.

 

My model of choice at this time is the Epson 4870 Photo, which I can get in the US for as little as $300-$350. I found it at Shop4Thai.com at about $615. Stuff here is just so damn expensive!

 

I'll look for it at Panthip this weekend.

[BaronTT]

Update.

 

I bought a high-end flat bed scanner, not a dedicated film scanner, so that I could make good use of it later when this project is done.

 

I've now done my first roll of 36 frames, and this is probably not a good way to go. It took me about 10 hours, start to finish. NOT including printing. Now that I've debugged my process, I could do it in 8, I think.

 

Before I started, I exchanged e-mails with an author of film scanning/ digital photo manipulation publications. When I told him of my plans he thought it wasn't a good idea to do a project like this because it would take 15-20 minutes per frame. This was his estimate of how long it would take an expert. He thought it was best simply to archive the original negatives.

 

I think I'll prioritize which rolls of film I want in digital format.

 

Maybe someday somone will develop a process that can do this all in 10 minutes instead of the current 10 hours.