Looking for a good reasonably priced photo scanner

[Nordichund]

Hi, I'm looking for a good, reasonably priced photo scanner, to copy my old negatives and photos. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated. I hear that Epson doesn't function very well with CS4 on a Mac.
Cheers

 

[ChrisA]

Hi, I'm looking for a good, reasonably priced photo scanner, to copy my old negatives and photos. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated. I hear that Epson doesn't function very well with CS4 on a Mac.
Cheers

My Epson scanner works well on the mac.

How many negative to you have? Are they all 35mm or some larger formats?

It is very time consuming to do this. At least five minutes per frame of your time and at least that much for the computer unattended. "ICE" is slow but an absolutely required feature for any scanner. So you can do about 12 an hour yourself or send them out to be scanned at a service about about 30 cents each. Put a value on your time and do the math.

If any restoraton is required it can take much longer than 5 minutes per frame, But you will have to remove some dust and scratches. Five minutes is enogh just for the most basic quality control and lableling.

I've scanned many myself and also sent thousands out to be scanned

Any of the higher-end Epson canners will work well for this. Not as good as the industry standard Nikon scanners but those cost low four digits prices. The features to looks for are (1) negative holders for our film size, 2) light in the lid. (3) Kodak's ICE, this is licenses by Kodak to most scanner makers and requres a fourch IR color channel. (4) minimum native resolution of 4800 DPI in both directions

Buy software from VuScan. This can do bter quality work than the included software.

Epson has a "close outs" section on their web site. The best deals are there

 

[-hh]

My Epson scanner works well on the mac.

...

Epson has a "close outs" section on their web site. The best deals are there

I've had an Epson USB/FW400 flatbed for a couple of years now...a "Photo 3200" or something like that.

When I upgraded to Photoshop CS4, I initially had a problem with it not being recognized: the problem is that CS4 no longer automatically includes the TWAIN driver plug-in.

Particularly if you're performing an upgrade to CS4, Google can find you the step-by-step instructions for how to find the right file and where to put it.


-hh

 

[Nordichund]

Thanks for the replies. Some very useful information. I have thousands of old negs and photos from the 80s and 90s. Some of the best ones I would like to to digitalise.
I will probably go with the Epson now I know you can use it on a Mac. 5 min a neg, should keep me out of trouble for a while