Nik very kindly lent me a scanner, it’s a Canon CanoScan FS4000US. I’ve thrown a couple of films at it, some 35mm neg and some APS but as yet no transparency. The anti-scratch and dust busting algorithms work well and the workflow into PhotoShop is reasonable, if not amazing. So far the results are good, but there’s a big catch:
it’s slow, real slow.
Although the scanner is capable of 4000dpi, I’ve been scanning at 2000dpi which gives a 2944 x 2000 pixel image for standard format 35mm (just under 17Mb or nearer 8Mb on average when JPEG compressed). Rather than make a cupa tea while waiting between scans, I’ve been going shopping, to the summer party, or for a paddle down the canal. Scanning APS is bearable, but anything cut into strips is long and laborious process. So, like I guess many others before me, rather than converting my old negs into digital files in one big bang; I’ll be doing the task piecemeal. Scanning a film on the side while doing some other imagery thing. It’ll also mean getting my own scanner since, kind as he is, I doubt Nik will take kindly to me hanging on to his for a couple of years [1].
There’s a lesson here for my digital archive: I need to make sure that both images and meta data can be easily and automatically transferred to new storage mediums.
Anyway, here’s an example scan from an APS, it’s skiing in Austria circa Feb 2000.
…and if you can get a decent idea of the scan quality by the time it’s been resampled down to display in a web page and JPEG’d to save bandwidth, be thankful.
footnotes
[1] the scanner’s going back in the morning 