[montezuma]

I'm thinking about scanning my negatives but I don't know which scanner to get. I see that there are flatbed scanners and dedicated negative/slide scanners. I don't care that much about speed, I just want really good resolution, low price would be nice too. Oh and where is all the film going?! I looked around b and h the other day and there selection is significantly lower. Thanks for all suggestions.

[artobest]

It's best to use a dedicated film scanner. I've seen people recommend the Plustek 7500i for good value, high resolution (7200 dpi!) scanning for negatives especially. If you're happy to pay more, a Nikon Coolscan could be the way to go.

I use a Konica-Minolta Scan Dual IV. It's 3200 dpi, very good quality, 16-bit, 16x oversampling (reduces noise greatly). It has no optical dust and scratch removal (like ICE or FARE), just a poor software implementation that I don't bother with, preferring to use Photoshop's healing brush in any case. (The Plustek has a proprietary version of ICE, but I've not heard good things about it.) It's compact and fairly quick, has a USB interface, and should be widely available second-hand. I have never had a single problem with it in 5 years!

Having said that, I tend to scan slides. It's much harder to get good results scanning negatives. Even black and white negs are best scanned as if they are colour slides.

[Arpe]

This series gets good write-ups as good value for money.