Slides to Digital.

Not all of those dedicated scanners are built the same. I have an Ion one which can operate stand alone (built in screen for preview, saves results as JPEGs to an SD card) and which I'm very happy with. I wouldn't claim it produces museum-quality results, but I was after something that could handle black and white negatives (for eventual printing) and also cope with old family slides - my Dad has boxes of them dating from the late '70s through to the 1990s.

The results have been pretty decent so far - here's a completely untouched scan of a mid '90s negative:

[IMG]http://i183.photobucket.com/albums/x21/Kingofthemountains/PICT0053.jpg[/IMG]

Subject is of limited interest, as I was about 14 at the time and had yet to grasp such concepts as "composition"!

I'm now planning to buy a couple of rolls of slide film and run them through my MX over the summer, as a bit of a nostalgia trip.

I bought a 'Veho' USB slide / negative scanner a couple of years ago, and, for the benefit perhaps of someone who might have encountered this thread via Google, I'd suggest that it should be avoided. It seems to overexpose light regions of certain images, so that any detail is blown out - uniform white skies are all too common on some snaps, for example. Some images look fine, to be fair.

I very much agree with the earlier comment that it's a time-consuming activity. Every negative or slide I've tried needed a good seeing to with GIMP's clone tool (or the equivalent in the provided Windows software, which works very well to be fair).

Still - it was cheap, and you get what you pay for, I suppose.

This is one of the worst examples from the slides I transferred a while ago. This young man is my older brother, pictured in the late '50s or early '60s.

Do I understand that you don't recommend anything like this
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/35mm-Negative-Film-Slide-Digital-Scanner-for-PC-Mac-NEW_W0...


Thanks

Howard

I have a Minolta Scan Dual 3 that i bought new some 5 years ago and i have been very happy with the results fom Kodachrome Slides as well as from Negs, I do find a little noise removal necessary Post Processing as the scanning shows up the crystalline nature of the film grain. I have produced some surprisingly good A4 prints from images.
I like the fact that you can pre-scan and adjust the image with a comprehensive set of tools before committing to a full scan with the adjustments already made.

Regards - Pete

My experience with a Scan Dual II was that using the scanner to make adjustments before scanning gave much poorer results than I got from a straight scan then adjustments in PS.

Michael

As a soon-to-be proud owner of a Minolta Scan Dual III I'd be interested in any tips for scanning slides, especially Kodachrome 64...

Best wishes, Kris.

Just leave it on the default settings abd it will work perfectly!

I think I can manage that! Thanks Ken.

K.

This partly repeats comments I made earlier in this thread which refer to experience of a Scan Dual II which may or may not be relevant to the III.

Avoid any of the scanner's own adjustment tools, just scan.

I found 905ppi scans were poorer than any other resolution when reduced to the same size on screen.

I found that going index - prescan - scan gave poorer results than index - scan. This defeated Minolta technical who could not explain it but agreed they could see the difference. Eventually I found just loading the carrier, indexing, selecting all four and scanning gave me the best result.

Dust can be a major problem. Holding one corner of the slide and flicking another with a finger hard gets rid of a lot. Just hope plastic mounts don't take exception to the treatment.

Michael

The Konica Minolta, like most film scanners, doesn't much like negatives, black and white or colour. Best results come from scanning everything as colour positive and converting in PS. Turn the scanner on about 20 minutes before you scan to warm up the lamp. Always scan at highest resolution and 16-bit, and multi-scan - at least 4x or even 8x if you intend to enlarge much. The K-M software is pretty decent - don't bother with Silverfast or Vuescan for this scanner, I don't see any difference in the quality of the scans - at least, not with slides.

All in all, a good scanner, using a top-notch scan engine, just without the bells and whistles (like digital ICE) of its big siblings (although the Scan Dual IV is a touch better).

I'll be using it almost entirely for colour slides. I have two filing cabinet drawers full of slides in archival quality hanging files. The majority I only need a "powerpoint" resolution for lectures. For some, however, I wouldn't mind decent quality images hence the scanner. Thanks for the tips, I'll post some images when the beastie arrives.

Thanks, K.

I've probably mentioned this before, but Kodachrome is made up in a different way to other slide films and is the least scan-friendly film. The Nikon Coolscan products have a Kodachrome setting as a consequence of this, so if the majority of your slides were indeed Kodachrome then it might be worth looking for a Coolscan.

Kris, I dont know what OS you are using but I found that the Minolta software doesn't run under Vista, XP is fine. Konica-Minolta don't offer support anymore of course.

I downloaded the trial version of vuescan and suddenly the Minolta software worked. Like Arto I could see no difference between the results of the two packages.

I dont find any difference between scanning negs and slides although grain does seem to be much more prominent in B+W. Most of the older mono work on my web site is from scanned negs (Tri-X exposed at 1600ASA though).

Well, the results I have had from Kodachrome have been perfect here' just one example: link straight from the scanner and no tweaking!

John... I remember you saying this before which has been one issue on the back of my mind. Well I have just bought the Minolta second-hand from Gary (thank you!) so I'll have to make it work one way or other. I have been thinking about and looking at scanners for quite some time but the cost put me off until this one came along.

Luckily I use XP (I loathe Vista with a passion) so I should be OK.

Thanks K.