28th Febuary 2007 - 13:16 GMT +/- 30 Seconds
You can't scan slides with it...
To do slides or negatives, you'll need a scanner with two light sources: (1)
Reflective for opaque material like paper, and, (2) Transmissive for
transparent material like slides, negatives, and transparencies.
HP and Epson have some good scanners for slides and negatives. Maybe Canon
does also but I don't know anyone who has a Canon scanner.
I think that you can stay under $200 U.S. for a scanner if you plan to do 5"
x 7" prints or smaller. If you plan to do enlargements at 8" x 10" or
larger, I believe you'll enjoy your results more if you stick to scanners
over that amount but that's just my uneducated personal opinion.
Can you make a light source for your CX6400 and force it to do slides?
People have done similar things with other scanners (mostly older scanners)
but I really wouldn't consider it myself. The time and money involved in
making some sort of light source with the required modifications to the
hardware programming of something like the CX6400 just wouldn't be worth it.
You can buy a scanner that will do slides for very little money.
Now, I don't necessarily recommend Epson over all other brands. Epson just
happens to be missing from my list of manufactures that I hate at the present
time and I just happen to be rather familiar with the Epson web site at this
moment in time. If Epson continues to p*ss me off with regards to other
things, they'll be on my sh*t list again and I'll tend to recommend something
else some other day. So, with that said, there's a refurbished Epson 3900
scanner for $79 with free shipping at the Epson web site if you click on
"clearance center." (Practically all the Epson stuff I've ever purchased is
refurbished and I bought through that clearance center. The stuff always
looks and works line new for me. One drawback is that the clearance center
items sometimes don't ship with the free software bundle. Epson "new"
scanners usually ship with Adobe PhotoShop Elements and it has some great
"healing" tools for working with slides and negatives.)
If I had never done slides/negatives before, that's the price point where I'd
jump in to see if it's something I'd want to do. If that seems like fun to
you, then I'd consider moving up to dump about $250 U.S. or so on a good
high-resolution scanner.
Making prints from slides and negatives is sometimes a tedious chore but it's
fun in a way.
Please also consider, your source (slide or negative) may not render an
acceptable enlargement if it was shot with a poor quality camera. So, maybe,
if most of your slides were shot with a "point and shoot" camera, you may not
want to bother enlarging beyond 5" x 7" anyway. In that case, an inexpensive
$79 scanner might be all you will ever want.
That's enough said here, I guess. Beyond this I suppose you need to move to
a scanner group.
//rus\\
