RE: Film/Slide Scanner

["Emily L. Ferguson" <elf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 8:50 AM -0500 9/4/08, David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
> On Thu, September 4, 2008 06:44, Chris wrote:
> >  Yes specialists are usually better and cheaper than doing it yourself.
>
> I don't expect better at that price-point.  You won't be getting drum
> scans. For that matter, I don't expect an expert operator, or even
> somebody who looks at the results.  I expect a stack-fed scanner operating
> on automatic.
>
> Which still might be an appropriate choice for the first pass.

Sure, but what's wrong with a light table for the first pass?  Surely 
most of us can read a b&w neg on a light table with a loupe and 
determine which images are actually worth storing digitally forever.

This push to have everything digitized still doesn't make sense to 
me.  Everything is not worth keeping in the world, and that includes 
strips of film, despite how economically they can be stored.

My standards for the condition of my final digitized images are very 
high.  They must be defect free - no dust, no scratches, no water 
spots - or why bother?  The files must be printable up to 12x18 at 
least.  And they must have significant content - it may be love, it 
may be compositional perfection, it may be a once-in-a-lifetime 
memory - but they must have significant content.

Once you sort through all that film or digital data and apply some 
standards to the pile, just how many images rise to the top?

Surely not 1000 from a brief trip.  Maybe 125, maybe a couple hundred 
on the outside, if you're a professional photographer, but a 
thousand?  $350 for so many images that cost less than $10 or so to 
store in plastic pages than to clean up, contrast correct, dodge and 
burn, crop and level, sharpen, keyword, caption, date, store and 
backup?

And are you then going to discard the originals?

As David says:

> What
> percentage of photos in the stack are likely to be of serious interest?

It seems to me that one begins there.
--
Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races
http://www.landsedgephoto.com
http://e-and-s.instaproofs.com/