Scanners for Large Negatives?

Ironsides asks: "My family has a number of old negatives that we would like to digitize. While we could spend the cash and have them all turned into prints and scan the prints, we would prefer to scan the negatives directly. One other problem is that several family members scattered throughout the country also have collections that would need to be scanned in and we could not possibly pay to have them all turned into prints. Now, here's the catch: a sizable number (at least 100 hundred, possibly several hundred) are 1:1 negatives that are 4x5 inches in size (yes, these are very old negatives). Now, I've been looking at slide and negative scanners and unfortunately it seems they only go up to 2.3x3.5 inches (6x9 cm). Does anyone know of a high quality scanner that will handle such large negatives?"

A drum scanner is designed for this.

[toby]

Find your local reprographics/graphic arts service bureau. They'll do this no problems -- there is no better instrument for the job than a drum scanner.

Epson flatbed

[sakusha]

A friend of mine is a retired photography professor who does a lot of work on a 4x5 view camera. He's using an older Epson flatbed scanner. It has an illuminator on top, and a frame that can hold four 4x5 negatives for gang scanning. It comes with a whole set of frames to hold negatives of various sizes from 35mm to 8x10. His Epson model is discontinued, but it appears the equivalent would be something like the Epson Perfection V750-M.

Flatbed

[cmowire]

Many of the Epson Flatbeds will take 4x5s just fine.

Too expensive - get a flatbed

[Derling Whirvish]

Drum scanners are extraordinarily expensive. Much less expensive to use a flat bed scanner that has back illumination. Good discussion here: http://photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0 032D0&tag= [photo.net] Microtek has several good models out.

4 recommendations

[bloosqr]

There are 4 you should consider and it all depends on the money you have .. btw 4x5 is medium format.. its not "ancient" but actually exists even today (w/ modern films)

(1) Nikon 9000 , its very expensive ($1700 or so) but will give you a 4000 dpi / 16 bit scan .. this is a dedicated 35/medium/large format film scanner that does up to 6"x9. The general consensus is this is the best home scanner for negatives.

(2,3) Epson M-750 PRO or V700 .. also somewhat expensive ($800,$500 or so) .. its flatbed does up to 4x5 at 6400 dpi

(4) Canon 9950f .. 4800 dpi scanner with an adjustable large/medium format negative tray (and 35mm as well of course) (about $300 or so)

I have the 9950f and the nikon 5000 (the 35mm version of the 9000) .. the nikon 5000 is better at 4000 dpi however with old slides /negatives it will not really make that much of a difference ..

The main feature of these is they have some version of dust removal (which does not work on black and white btw), they all have color restoration if your negatives are pretty old and all the other good stuff.

The epsons are the ones i think the high end (modern) medium/large format people who aren't doing $100 per slide professional lab scans are using. I dont think you can go wrong with any of these. If you are only going to use this for the web and/or computer monitors (and not into tinkering with photoshop etc) I would get the 9950f as it is the most straightforward and cheapest. With medium format film (4x5) you can go to massive size prints even with a canon 9950f to be honest.

Ignore the drum scanner comments.

[temojen]

I use a CanoScan 9950f for 4x5 and 6x6 (inches and cm, respectively; the photography world is funny like that). It does just fine for prints up to 24"x24"@300ppi from 6x6. True, a drum scanner is sharper, but so many times the price, and you can get similar results by over-scanning and downsampling. True, a flatbed doesn't have the same DMax, but your negatives aren't fully opaque anyways.

Try this (for B&W negs):

1. Use a CanoScan 9950f or Epson v750*
2. Get a registered copy of VueScan [hamrick.com]
3. Scan at your scanner's max physical resolution for 6x6, and 1/2 max for 4x5
4. Set white and blackpoints to 0.
5. Scan at 16 bit depth greyscale, 2 samples, no sharpening, no dust correction
6. Save as 16 bit Tiff
7. Load your images in Cinepaint or Photoshop CS or Elements 4 or later
8. Adjust the "Levels" to set your desired black and white points.
9. Save this to your archive as a 16 bit tiff.

now, for each desired print or display size:

1. Open the image in your editor
2. Resample down to the desired size (@300ppi for minilabs and many inkjets, 360ppi for Epson inkjets, ignore ppi and dpi for screen display)
3. Apply unsharp mask (you can sharpen a LOT on large B&W)
4. If you have a profile for your printer or lab, convert to that. If you're sending to a minilab you don't have a profile for or posting online, convert to sRGB.
5. If printing on your own printer, save this file as print-ready, 16 bit profiled tiff.
6. If you're sending to a minilab or posting online, convert to 8bit and save as JPEG (98% qual for minilabs, 75% ish for posting

* CanoScan models don't work on Linux; the Epson v750 may with Vuescan (needs libUSB and USB group access).

I did the same thing

[plover]

I recently scanned all of my in-laws 35mm slides (over 3000 slides) and burned DVDs for them for holiday presents, and I learned a lot of lessons in the exercise.

I spent a lot more time than I had to because I scanned them all at 20MB raw image size (the jpegs averaged roughly 6MB each when I was done.) My intent was to keep good-quality archival copies of the slides. However, these large files meant that every action with them was slow: transferring them from the scanner via USB 1.2 took like 40 seconds per image, loading and saving them in an editor to rotate and crop them was slow, importing them into Arcsoft to produce the slideshow was slow, and so on.

Decide what you intend to do with the digital images first. Are you going to archive them as I did? Then accept that it will be slow. An archival quality scan of the medium format film that you describe will take hundreds of megabytes per image. But if you're just going to burn a DVD for the family and discard the scans as intermediate files, scan them at DVD resolutions and you'll save a ton of time throughout the process.

Invest in some good scanning software. The out-of-the-box stuff I got from Minolta was slower than molasses. It took it 20 seconds to autofocus each slide individually, and that was prior to the scan itself! I purchased Vuescan from Hamrick software and it sped the process considerably. They support many dozens of scanners, film profiles, etc. It automated the process of scanning a full carrier of slides. It was worth every penny to me.

Use a dust brush on each and every negative before scanning it. A cheap squeezy rubber-bulb brush will clean up most dust and hairs nicely, and they're only like $5.00.

Don't bother printing them unless you actually want the prints of the pictures.

Find a good program to help rotate and crop the images, clean up dust specks, and fix colors. I used Paint Shop Pro, and eventually got pretty fast at it. Later, I found RPhoto (freeware! on the web) that enabled me to whip through rotating and cropping at high speeds.

Figure out in advance how you want to organize the images you scan. I built a directory structure by year, and scanned the images in rough chronological order. If there is no organization to your media, be sure to take the time to tag them at some point in the process (probably the time you crop and rotate them.) Names, places and dates are all good searchable data. I used a short description for the file names, but I wish I'd edited the EXIF data when I had the chance.

Regarding medium format film, ask about flatbed scanners at a good photography shop. When I was shopping for newer film scanners, I found an Epson flatbed with a "negative attachment." It consisted of a backlight-box that had a snap-in film carrier on the bottom that would hold 2 five-frame 35mm filmstrips. You could remove the film carrier and use a larger frame to hold your negatives in place (the adjustable carriers that you use in enlargers to hold medium format film comes to mind.)

Once you figure out what you're doing, take a few minutes and write up an instruction sheet. You'll probably go stir-crazy after scanning a thousand frames, and you'll likely want to take a break for a few months. It's nice to come back to full instructions so you can pick up exactly where you left off.

Realize that this will take a lot of your time. Check with a commercial photo house and ask about their scanning rates. I was quoted from about $0.75 per slide to $1.20 per slide. Of course with over three thousand slides to scan I wasn't about to spend that kind of money, but I did spend several hundred on a Minolta Dimage film scanner, and many, many hours scanning. That's where the instruction sheet helped -- my wife picked it up and she started scanning in her free time, too! You might want to consider hiring a photo house to use a drum scanner just for your medium format slides, rather than tackle them yourself. You'll get the best quality scans

Flatbeds; beyond that, Imacon.

[Kadin2048]

He did say a "high quality" scanner. While that's pretty vague, I just thought that I'd point out that if you wanted to go upmarket of the good quality flatbeds already mentioned, the next step before you get into drum scanning territory (real PMT-based drum scanners) and start seeing price tags that rival Italian automobiles, would be something like the Imacon Flextight, maybe a 343 or a 646 [imacon.dk]. I have seem some 4x5 Provia scans done on one of them, and they're pretty amazing.

It all depends on what this guy's budget is, which he didn't really say. If the budget is in the hundreds, a flatbed is definitely the way to go. If it's in the thousands, an Imacon will allow for some real archival-grade scans (although preserving the digital files may be harder than preserving the negatives) and ridiculous enlargability.

Re:Flatbed

[Zachary Kessin]

If you have a lot of 4x5's check out some of the large format photography pages (http://www.largeformatphotography.info/). 4x5 and larger photography is still something that people are activily doing, so they have looked at these issues before. http://www.photo.net/ [photo.net] is also a good place to look

Epson Flatbeds

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a professional photographer which uses a medium format camera and film.
For my scanning purposes I am satisfied with an Epson Perfection 4990 Photo flatbed.
It can scan negatives up to 8x10".
And btw, lots of people still use film and Large Format cameras. The quallity and
resolution you get from such a negative is unmatchable.

My B&W negative scanning project

[nortcele]

If you can afford it, get the Nikon 9000. Sell it when you are done. I settled on using an Epson 4990 since I wanted the flatbed for other things. If the difference between a good flatbed and a dedicated film scanner matters to you, then get the dedicated. The film trays that come with the Epson 4990 work pretty well, but I got a better film carrier from http://www.betterscanning.com/ [betterscanning.com] Takes a lot of the hassle out of curled negatives. Also. If you plan to post process your scans much, I highly recommend Photoshop with either NeatImage, http://www.neatimage.com/ [neatimage.com] or Noise Ninja, http://www.picturecode.com/ [picturecode.com] for removing noise. FocalBlade or FocusMagic, http://www.focusmagic.com/ [focusmagic.com] has it's place too for some of pictures of interest. Post processing is going to be key in getting the best results from your scanning effort. Figure out what you are willing to live with, because it's unrealistic to scan every negative in at max resolution due to the size of the resulting file.

As mentioned in previous posts, the Digital ICE dust/scratch removal doesn't work on B&W film. Also Kodachrome color slide film may not work well with certain scanners when trying to use the auto dust/scratch removal.

B&W presents some challenges. You must scan at 16 bits/channel resolution, otherwise, B&W results will be too contrasty and lose shadow detail. It sometimes helps to scan as positives then invert the image in Photoshop. Secondly, flatbed scanners tend to be noisy. This can be offset by using a multiple-pass option. Four passes work reasonably well without taking a lot of time. Quite a bit of this noise can be dealt with via NeatImage or Noise Ninja as well. Since Digital ICE (available on the 4990) does not work with B&W, you will get a lot of dust. Resist using third-party dust reduction software since it seriously degrades the image. Just plan to Photoshop images you plan on printing.

If you are wanting to really get down and do some serious negative scanning, quickly (and cost is not restricting). Get a Creo Eversmart (now owned by Kodak) flatbed scanner. http://graphics.kodak.com/global/product/scanners/ professional_scanners/default.htm [kodak.com] These are the machines that image archives use when dealing mass volume. It is impractical to drum scan every slide/negative in an archive, and this is an excellent compromise.

The main thing is to make sure your negatives keep protected. In another 10-15 years, the scanning capabilities will be much, much better. However, the people you want to enjoy seeing these scanned images might be gone! So it's best to use what you can and get the job done. Let the next generation scan again if they want it done better.