It seems like I get new toys in sporadic bursts; tonight I’m messing with the latest one, a slide/35mm film scanner. This may seem like an odd thing to have for someone who doesn’t even own a film camera (he said as his photographer grandfather spins in his grave), but I’ve wanted one of these for ages for an entirely different reason. I have quite a slide collection. Many moons ago, I was very much into slides of photos from various and sundry NASA missions, and amassed quite a collection. In later years, I routinely salvaged promotional photo slides that were due to be thrown away at the places where I worked. These would usually be the very familiar publicity photos, logos, etc. (you see, everyone else got the same slides sent to them too), in 35mm color slide form. Some years back my slide projector broke, so I’ve had a ton of slides and nothing that I could really do with them.
Now, as with so many other things in my life, they can be digitally archived. The scanner itself is a pint-sized cousin of my flatbed scanner, and makes roughly the same disagreeable grinding noises. The scanner software itself is a hoot, obviously a product of a tech writer or translator for whom English isn’t even high enough on the food chain to be a second language; maybe fourth or fifth. When my first scans were X-ray negatives, I figured out that I needed to switch to “generic color” mode instead of “nagetive” (yes, that’s really how the software spells it). The result of a good scan is a rather large TIFF file, and I usually need to do some color and contrast balancing in Paint Shop Pro. But the images turn out nicely. (I’ve already turned a couple of my early slide-scanning experiments into images on the front page of the site; see if you can spot them.)
These are all vastly reduced in size; the original scans are 2000+ pixels across, if just slightly fuzzy. (One of these things is not like the other…)
I remember loaning out my slide collection to the outfit that produced the very, very short-lived Sci-Fi Channel series Sciography. Originally they were interested in the B5 slides, some of which are promotional images that have been all but buried since then, but upon learning that I had a collection of promo slides numbering into the hundreds, they asked to borrow the whole works.
The most recent additions to my slide collection were a bunch of pre-release “artist’s conceptions” of various Atari 2600 and 7800 games (some of which, of course, ended up looking nothing like the finished product) that I acquired from former Atari engineer (and home trackball designer) Dan Kramer.
I’m quite pleased with this little gadget overall; even with the “nagetive” settings and whatnot. 😆
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Negative scanners are pretty cool. If you recall, I got mine about a year ago and it was fun scanning in my old negatives. When I first got the scanner I wanted to scan at the highest resolution (2400 bpi, I think). That took forever and it didn’t really improve the quality of the scan. That’s partly because, at certain scan resolutions, the granular pattern of the film interferred with the rectangular pattern of the scanner. Makes a nice moire pattern but it doesn’t make for a great picture. As a result, most of my scans are at 600 dpi.
Another problem I discovered is that I have to resize my scans if I want to incorporate them with other pictures via photoshop. My digital camera generates pictures at 144 dpi and if I try to add a scanned picture to it via Photoshop, the scanned picture is HUGE!!!! I have to either resize the negative or change it to match the dpi of the other picture.
Oops. Sorry for the babblin’. Enjoy your new scanner!
Actually, your mention of getting one some time back was what put the mental post-it note in the back of my brain to grab a film/neg scanner if I ever found an affordable one.
The one huge pang of regret is that my grandfather, who was an award-winning photographer, put together a huge number of slide shows of his work, and narrated them all, put cue tones on his cassettes and had it all keyed to work with the theater-style viewing gallery he built in the basement of his home. I have no idea what happened to all of his work when he died about 11 years ago, and I wish that this technology had been around to preserve all of that work while he was alive. He was a traditionalist, but he was intrigued enough the year that I brought my video camera with me that I think he might’ve been tickled to have his stuff archived as JPGs, MP3s, and Flash slideshows. That’s the one regret that just kills me. I could do that now.
Anyway, now I’m babbling. This is what happens when it’s 5am.
It’s a bummer that your grandfather’s photos appear to be lost. It’s really cool to scan old pictures you haven’t seen since you were a kid or never seen before.
I plan to borrow my parents pictures and negatives someday. My mom doesn’t understand but I hope to convince her to part with them for the short time it takes me to scan them. They have a lot of old pictures and so it would be a major project (bigger than scanning all of my pictures). My first goal is to scan pictures of me and my siblings when we were young.