[wildman]

Just came into possession of old family positive color slides in both 35mm and 120 film.

The 35mm are all mounted but the 120 (2 1/4 x 2 1/4") film is both mounted and unmounted (fully developed and cut into 5 frame strips).

What's your thoughts on how to get from this to digital files?

Would consider doing the work myself or sending it out to a lab.
If I did send the work out any suggestions?

I'm not looking for perfect fine art conversion just something that will give me decent quality.

Thanks,
Wildman

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Last edited by wildman; 01-12-2012 at 01:22 AM.

[mtansley]

I had the same sort of problem about six years ago.

I decided to do the job mysellf and bought an Epson 4490 scanner. (don't know what the equivalent is now).

This scanner came with adapters for 35mm film, slides and 120 film.

It did a nice job, maybe not lab quality but good enough for me and good enough to get a few 13 x 19 enlargements of some of the special slides done at a lab. (I sent the scanned file to them instead of the slide.)

It's a tradeoff between what the lab would charge versus the cost of a scanner and your time with quality thrown in as well.

The scanner came in handy for other jobs as well.

Hope this helps.

[Lowell Goudge]

I am not sure about the 120 film but for slides there are some relitivly low cost 5mp scanners. While not fine art 5mp is enough for 8x10 prints. I used a 10MP Minolta scanner to do all 20k of my slides and print film. Took 5 years of my spare time but now that it's done it was worth it.

[wildman]

OK.

Checked things out and ordered a Epson Perfection V600. Should do the job.
Just a thought - can these scanners work with color print negs? - Kodacolor for instance?

[SpecialK]

I had the same sort of problem about six years ago.

I decided to do the job mysellf and bought an Epson 4490 scanner. (don't know what the equivalent is now).

This scanner came with adapters for 35mm film, slides and 120 film.

It did a nice job, maybe not lab quality but good enough for me and good enough to get a few 13 x 19 enlargements of some of the special slides done at a lab. (I sent the scanned file to them instead of the slide.)

It's a tradeoff between what the lab would charge versus the cost of a scanner and your time with quality thrown in as well.

The scanner came in handy for other jobs as well.

Hope this helps.

Same here, except it was a 4990 I think. Used it for doing "proof scans" of all my old stuff - about 1500 images, up to 4x5, and family history stuff as well. Mostly dormant at this point, though.

[mtansley]

Same here, except it was a 4990 I think.

I think they were very similar except your 4990 could handle larger negatives than my 4490.

Mine is mostly dormant now as well.

[mtansley]

OK.

Checked things out and ordered a Epson Perfection V600. Should do the job.
Just a thought - can these scanners work with color print negs? - Kodacolor for instance?

If your V600 is the later version of my 4490 then it can handle color print negs. I did lots on mine.

[SpecialK]

You can also just reverse the color in a photo editor :-)

(And yep, the 4990 has a 4x5 carrier and a generic 8x10 frame thing...)

[SteveM]

I purchase a Canon 8800F flatbed that takes 35 and 120 for just over $100 CA. It's very slow but I chipped a way at the stack of slides and eventually got them all done. One of the benefits of buying a scanner is that I now own it and can shoot film and scan them when I feel like it. The quality is reasonable, but PP really helps.

[photolady95]

Just a thought - can these scanners work with color print negs? - Kodacolor for instance?

Yes, mine, an Epson 4490 Photo, works fine for negatives and prints. Scanned my 3000+ negatives and not so many slides, and older family prints and it's still going strong after three years.

[torpesco]

I've used a Canon FS 2710 for scanning slides (35mm) and APS. Missing the 35mm film adapter.

For software I use VueScan in batch mode and find it speeds up the workflow a bit, at least. Does anyone use other software they like better? It's been a couple years since I did any scanning - I should find out if they've made any updates and finish off my scanning.

[slip]

I have a dedicated film/slide scanner I bought a few years back before digital cameras were affordable. It is a canon fs4000 which can scan a slide/film at 4000x4000 dpi which turnes out to be between 60 and 100 mb, more then enough resolution to work with.
I paid 1400 dollars but you likely can get them for a song on fleebay as most people don't use film anymore.
most labs charge between 2-10 dollars a scan, the drum scanner is the best option but you pay for it. if you are only printing 4x6 then a 100 dollar slide/film scanner from a department store likely would work well.

this was taken with my film camera a ricoh xr-m with a 35-70mm lens and scanned with the fs4000us (slide transparency, kodak echachrome SP?)

[wildman]

UPDATE:

My first crude attempts at conversion.

Scanner Epson Perfection V600
Camera Rollie F with Zeiss 2.8 Planar
Some kind of Agfa color slide film dated 1966 120 size
Software Vuescan 9.0.73
3200 dpi
Color balance a bit off but I'll get better at it.

Subject:
The house my Grandfather was born in. Built in 1666 by my family and still owned within my family. It's an old mill. Located in the Westerwald area of Germany.

Got a lot of work ahead of me - many of the slides are really in bad condition - mold and fading mostly. I'll take digital storage over hard copy any day from what I see.

Second one was from a 1923? neg of unknown film size and type. Made up custom mask out of heavy black paper and slipped it under 120 film holder and it worked fine. It was in awful shape and only a tiny portion was useable. Highly cropped. It least what's left is useable. It was good practice to work on something so far gone. Took over an hour and a lot of Photoshop though. Printed it out on the inkjet on 4x6 paper and it actually looks better than this little thumbnail view but you get the idea.

[Stringmike]

I just inherited my father-in-law's library of slides, prints and negatives. He shot in 120 format for a number of years before switching to Leica 35mm. I have something like 5,000 35mm color slides (mostly Kodachrome), a similar number of 35mm black and white negatives and around 600 120 negatives.

I was thinking of a batch scanner like the Pacific Imaging 5,000 or 3650 for the slides and then using a flatbed (like the V600 or V750) for the rest. It seems folks buy batch scanners for jobs like mine and then resell them.

Anyone here have any experience with batch scanning?

And how about cleaning slides and negatives - some have what appears to be fungus and a lot have dust.

Mike

[mtansley]

For cleaning negatives & slides I used a cleaner called PEC-12 and some special lint-free wipes called Pec-Pads. They were a little pricy but the cleaner can be used on both sides of a negative with no damage and the wipes are lint-free and very clean.

I also kept a blower brush nearby at all times. I blew the loose dust off first and then cleaned (only if they were really dirty) them before scanning.