Mike Fox said:
A bunch of us guys live in a retirement home, and together, we have 10
of thousands of 35mm slides. We want to copy the best of them to DVDs
and sent those to our kids.
Could someone tell us where to get some good advice on what equipment
and programs to buy. A bunch of us will go in on-the-buy, and we want
good equipment that's not difficult to run and will stand up to a lot
of use.
We're thinking of a good film scanner with auto-loader for slides, an
external USB 2 large hard drive, and an external DVD burner with
software to edit the image files and burn the files to DVDs in a
format that will play on TV DVD players. We have a computer lab with
some nice new computers, and we'd like to plug the equipment into the
USB ports and do our thing.
But we don't know a lot, and we don't want to buy a lot of problems--
Advice?
The only practical solution for that requirement is a Nikon LS-5000 and
an SF-210 adapter. Make sure you get the SF-210 since, as Surfer noted,
the older SF-200 requires a bit of coaxing with a credit card to become
reliable. Despite the typo in his post, the SF-210 is fully compatible
with the LS-5000, in fact it was introduced at the same time as it. This
version should not require any credit card adjustment.
I would caution against buying any of this stuff used from Ebay, unless
you are confident at stripping it all down and cleaning front silvered
mirrors etc. You never know how dirty used equipment is until you try
it - and, in my experience, Nikon scanners need cleaning every few years
even if they are kept clean, and much more frequently if they aren't. If
you are confident of cleaning optics - and older people seem to be more
capable of doing practical stuff like this than today's disposable
generation - you can get a real good deal on Ebay with the 4000 series.
Advice?
Buy or make a good dust plastic cover for the scanner as soon as you get
it. This should be able to seal the scanner from the environment
whenever it is not being used. Ideally a zip-lok bag with the zip over
the top of the scanner so that the entire cover just opens like a
clamshell when the scanner is in use.
Don't let anyone who smokes near your scanner. The best solution is to
take them out the back of your home and ritually stone them - that will
cure them of the filthy habit, if nothing else, but they won't mess your
scanner again. ;-)
Organise a shift rota for scanning and define a standard scan process
that everyone adheres to. The LS-5000 is fast, but 10,000 slides is
about a month of continual scanning, 24 hours a day 7 days a week. By
the time you add editing on top, you are looking at a years work every
hour of every day - more likely 5 years with sensible bodily functions
between. Nobody is going to do that on their own and you don't want Joe
Bloggs hogging the scanner because he cant get a decent scan from his
black and white image of great niece Nancy on her third birthday.
Always scan at the maximum resolution of the scanner - it only takes a
couple of minutes on the LS-5000 anyway - and THEN downsample with
Photoshop to the resolution you want to put on your kids' DVDs. If you
get Photoshop, you can automate this and do complete directories at a
time, ready to burn to DVD. However, always store your originals at the
full resolution on DVD as well. You never know when your kids are going
to come back and tell you they want to send your picture to National
Geographic because they heard they are doing an article on how they did
things in the old days - and you certainly don't want the pesky little
brats telling the world that your photos look soft because your eyesight
was bad even then! ;-) So save originals at 4000ppi, even if you do
this on jpg with high quality. For slide shows, 640x480 is usually as
good as TVs get, but a good digital projector can go up to 1600x1200
these days, so that is probably a sensible size to save disposables at.
Use NikonScan to make batch scans with the SF-210 - don't use the TWAIN
interface to your image editor. NikonScan writes files to disk after
batch scanning, while most other applications keep the files in memory -
crashing the application after only a few scans and losing your data.
With NikonScan, you can top up the SF-210 with more slides indefinitely
- great if you are saving them to a networked drive, then you can edit
them on a completely different machine as they pop out without
disturbing the scanner process.
Do use the adjustments on NikonScan to set up default scan parameters,
such as black point, white point, gamma and colour etc. then scan as
16-bit data. Some argue against this, but they have never produced any
evidence that the lost information as a consequence of the up-front
processing is worth retaining.
Make sure you switch ICE off when scanning Kodachrome batches or black
and white negatives. ICE sometimes works with Kodachrome, but is
unpredictable, so only try it on single Kodachrome slides. If dust is a
problem, and it sounds like it probably is, use the software methods in
Photoshop to fix it or try scanning bad slides as singles. Kodachrome
usually says Kodachrome on the slide mount so if it doesn't say
Kodachrome on the mount, try ICE on a one off sample.
When your 10,000 scans are complete sell your LS-5000 and SF-210 on Ebay
and buy a barrel of beer with the proceeds.
