Flabed Scanners a =s negative film scanners - help!

I bough an HP flatber scanner at Circuit City on clearance for $49.99.
Resolution is 1200 x 1200. It comes with a built-in negative adapter.

I have a Rebel Digital, a Canon S40, and D-390. Can this flatbed
scanner help me turn the old film negatives into digtal photos remotely
as good as the ones my otehr cameras produce on a rouitine basis?

I have not unpacked it ad can still retun it. Please advice!

What should I get that is goo on the low end?

Jose

 

Depends on what you mean by "remotely".
Your Rebel and S40 will produce 6 & 4 MP images respectively.
The scanner, at best, would generate a 2 MP image.
For some reason, pixels generated by flatbeds, especially entry level one,
are not of the same quality as those generated by upscale digicams.
Therefore you are likely to get an image equivalent to that captured at
about 1.4 MP by a digicam.
This image will be fine for e-mails and 4x6 prints. Even a 5 x7 should be
acceptable. But that is about it.
But Hell! At $50 how can you go wrong.
Bob Williams

 

You have some expensive equipment for taking pictures, but your purchase of
a $50 scanner for the slides seems out of proportion to the other cameras.

The scanner resolution is 1200x1200 dpi - dots per inch. A slide will be
about 1.3 in x 1in which means the maximum optical resolution is 1800 x 1200
dpi.

The Rebel generates 6MP for whatever the CCD size may be, perhaps 1.3 x 1
in. Hence the rebel will generate a more detailed image.

True slide/negative scanners are designed for much higher resolution,
typically around 4,000 dpi since they are going to be scanning a very small
area.

The scanner will generate an image for you from the slides, but you may not
be happy with the results when printed, especially if you have to crop.

The scanner resolution is fine for scanning photos, hard copy, etc.

If you want to convert these slides "permanently" then I would recommend
either get a true slide scanner or have the slides scanned onto Kodak Photo
CD's by a local store. Note that there is a difference between Photo CD's
whose images are max of around 2000 x 2000 dpi vs Picture CD's whose images
are more like 700 x700 dpi. There is also a "Pro" Photo CD version which is
more expensive, but has images up to around 4,000 x 4,000 dpi.

You could buy a less expensive scanner with around 2,400 x 1,200 dpi
resolution. This may generate files which could satisfy your needs.

A big problem in scanning slides and negactives is dust. The true
slide/negative scanners frequently have built in dust elimination. One
brand of correction is called "I.C.E.". I forget what the acronym means,
but it makes two passes and compares them to eliminate dust.

We just bought a regular flat bed scanner with "I.C.E", but despite having
optical resolution of 2,400 x 1,200, it will only scan with "I.C.E" at a
maximum of 600 dpi and is much slower due to the two pass and processing.

Dave Paine.

 

go to
http://www.scantips.com/
and read it all - it will take you about 2 hours, but you will be an
expert on scanning when you are done!

chris

 

Sorry - I prefer not to have Goo on my low end at all.

 

Plus the dpi values of flatbed scanners are most often exagurated.
True resolution is usually not even half the listed value.
Therefore a 3200 dpi flatbed doesn't even come close to a 2820 film scanner.
Martin

 

scanner.

The following site shows the new 4800 dpi Epson being not quite as good as a
2700 dpi scanner.

http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~longnose/scanner_test.html

Still, for MF, that looks pretty good to me: Certainly good enough for quite
good 12 x 17 (A3) from 645 and 8x10 from 35mm.

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan