Epson Perfection V330 photo scanner

I'm considering buying an Epson Perfection V330 photo scanner to digitise
all my 35mm kodachrome slides, B&W and colour negs. It's £85 at Amazon.

I wondered if anybody has tried this scanner and has any comments?

Cheers, Phil.

 

I have a V300. A few (random) thoughts in no particular order;

- Boy, are my slides dirty. Despite a lot of effort to keep them clean.
Factor in time and effort for slide cleaning.

- Reloading the slides into the carrier is a PITA. I got very bored after
a few dozen, and I have thousands of them.

- The quality of the scans is disappointing. The saturation and resolution
are both poor. I haven't really investigated why (the previous point is
a factor.)

All things considered, I concluded it wasn't worth the effort, although
not so much that I got rid of the scanner.

 

I think the choice for quality slide scanning lies between an Epson
V700 and one of the Nikon dedicated slide scanners. People will argue
the toss for ages about which is better but unless you're going to
spend a *lot* of time optimising the results and your slides are of
top quality to start with either will do a satisfactory job.

The Epson V700 has a slide frame that sits on the glass and holds 12
2"x2" slides which are scanned all in one go (though it takes a fair
time to do it). I believe you can stack slides in the Nikon scanners.

 

TBH, if I ever wanted to get them done, I'd likely have it done
commercially.

The 300 has a similar arrangement, although it's 4 slides.

 

Doing 12 at a time rather than 4 is quite an advantage, it takes long
enough that you can do other things while you wait.

 

On Wed, 4 Jan 2012 13:34:20 +0000

Solitaire, minesweeper ...

 

scanners.


Nonsense. The Nikon scanners are no longer made and used examples
now fetch ridiculously high prices. The slide feeder accessories are
also discontinued and expensive, and they were always problematic
anyway.

There are some cheap dedicated film scanners available and these are
very popular for digitising old collections of mega and slides. The
results are much better than those from any flatbed scanner
except.the most expensive.

In the mid-range there are the Plustek dedicated film scanners.
These are almost as good as the NIKON scanners and more than good
enough for the average user.

You can buy one of these new, scan your film and sell it used on eBay
for only about £50-70 less than you paid for it. Alternatively, buy
a used example on eBay and sell it for what you paid.

So my recommendation would be to buy a Plustek, but if good quality
scans are not the top priority, but low cost is. one of the cheaper
film scanners might do.

 

I've got a Plustek 7500i. It only scans one frame at a time and is
therefore time consuming but the results are excellent.

 

I've kept mine stored in slide boxes, most of them seem to be in good
nick.

As long as they're better than scanned prints, which is all I have at the
moment, I'll be fairly happy. I'm sure GIMP will help, it has done for
the prints I've scanned.

Most of my slides haven't been seen for over 20 years, it would be good to
see them again.

Thanks for the comment.

 

The V700 is over £400, a bit pricey for me!

 

The Plustek is a bit expensive for me as well!

I'll keep looking, but may go for the Epson V330, the ordinary scanner
part will still be useful.

Many thanks for all the comments.

 

Me too!

Me too! Especially since my projector packed up years ago. Can you even still
buy them?

You're welcome.

 

I still have a 30+ year old Leitz Pradovit RA-150. The autofocus
mechanism's knackered and I don't have a screen, but apart from that it
still works. I've tried copying slides by photographing the projection on
a wall, which is not very good quality and extremely time consuming.