It's a good point. So far, my digital photos take up about 90 Gb, (excluding the backups) which is since Jan 2007. Hopefully I'll be Ok for a little while yet.

It's an option. As I said,

Once they're all scanned, they won't be accessed very often, probably, other than the few I pick for further work. So I'm not yet sure it'll be worth doing much more than keeping a couple of backups.

Points taken guys, but I have 3 TB more storage than I had the day before yesterday, so it's a bit academic now.

838 TIFFs is taking up 55 Gb so far, so there's space to spare until the end of the project at least. I may convert all but the best 1% or less to JPG at the end.

One 1TB drive is in the computer, and the other two are in external drives that I'll be backing up to daily, and alternating off site weekly. I might get another 1TB drive and mirror it with the one in the computer, but I think I'm Ok for now.


In case anyone's interested, I bought two of these, and put the disks in myself. They seem pretty good over USB - haven't tried eSATA yet.

Hey, great thread title

Well, I've done nearly 800 now.

There was a short pause when I ran out of disk space!

My progress has been a lot faster than I'd expected, so I had to wait a couple of days for the delivery of three 1 TB hard disks.

I now have two external drives for alternating backup, and plenty of space inside the computer.

I'm still scanning at the default 4000 dpi resolution, with 8 bits of colour, which produces TIFFs about 69 Mb in size.

A strip of four negs goes through in 7 minutes, using ICE on the 'normal' setting. Most of the negs are in reasonable condition, so that tends to be adequate.

Using Nikon Scan, the supplied software, it's very much a case of:

- feed the strip in
- pick the saved settings
- click 'scan'
- verify that the next sequence number is right
- do something else for a few minutes until the strip is ejected

I don't have it do previews, and with a couple of exceptions, I use auto-focus and auto-exposure. I can't see the difference between 8 bits colour and 16, so I reckon that I'll leave it on 8 until I find a picture worth spending more time on.

It's turning out to be a lot easier than I expected - at the current rate, I could probably get the whole lot done in a couple of months, although I expect the novelty will wear off and it might take me six.

So I've heard.

Those N- numbers - pah! There's just no way you can improve on G-SABR is there?
I'm planning to go too.

PhotoME can read the lens name out of a PEF.

Do you have a tripod? If so, why not use long exposures and natural light?

It doesn't come much more suited to tight budgets than that

I have two of these, and yes, they're identical to the Pentax one apart from the badge.

The manuals, however, are not the same.

The Pentax one is quite a bit more extensive. The Samsung one excludes the chapters about compatibility with Pentax cameras - I can't remember the details, but it's definitely worth downloading the Pentax manual and using that in preference to the Samsung one.

Maybe I've misunderstood. Please forgive me if so.

Just because art is personal doesn't mean that it isn't to be discussed.

Expressing a view that something is good or bad, liked or disliked, for one reason or another should not be discouraged just because that view is subjective.

We don't all like, or value the same things, and our views change over time. Not to discuss both our similarities and our differences would mean we'd lose a lot, I think.

And even an expert can sometimes learn something from the uneducated view.