Boomhauer

35mm film Photographs from 2 decades ago. Wanna email to friend.

What is the best method?
Best type of retail outlet that can digitize/scan it for me?

I assume Office Depot can do it but is there some place the pros would take it too?

dunroving

A friend recommended these guys: ScanCafe - Photo Scanning, Negative Scanning, Slide Scanning, Video Transfer, Photo Restoration

Steerpike

Interesting. They claim high quality and charge $0.33 per picture. I had about 24 boxes of color slides, each with approx 100 slides in them - so 2,400. And these were my 'best' pictures (edited down from tens of thousands taken). At .33 per pic, that would have cost me $800.

I ended up buying a very nice Nikon slide/negative scanner back in ~2004 timeframe for several hundred $ ($600, I think), and slowly working through the collection. I didn't complete it until 2012! (not that it was a priority!). Just the actual mechanical scan took several minutes per frame - the device I used had a 'dust removal' technique that first scanned the 'surface' of the slide, and used that info to 'subtract' the dust and scratches from the 'image' scan. Then you had to decide on a myriad of settings and choices. It was a nightmare. I probably spent at least 30 minutes per picture, overall.

I'd happily pay someone $800 to do all that ... IF their quality was good.

Boomhauer

I saw that while researching but the issue with them, and other similar services , is that one has to mail the photos to them; there isn't a retail outlet. I don't want to risk losing the photos in the mail since I don't have the negatives.

Steerpike

Costco seem to offer local services, but I don't see the scanning of prints specifically ... Services & Pricing: 35mm Slides to DVD ; slides seem to be the closest.

If you live in a major metropolitan area, you should have a high-end photographic store somewhere. In the Bay Area, we have 'Adolph Gasser', and they offer scanning of prints ... Photo Lab Services-Adolph Gasser
.

Here's another one in Palo Alto that I've used in the past: Professional Camera Store, Digital Cameras and Accessories| Keeble & Shuchat Photography Store – Palo Alto, CA . If I read their pricing correctly, it's $10 PER PHOTO to scan a paper print!

These stores are a dying breed, thanks to Amazon, Costco, and their ilk. So don't expect a bargain.

If you just want to scan a few prints, you could buy a $100 flatbed scanner and get reasonable results. Scanning a print is a lot easier - for the 'home user' - than scanning negatives or slides.

robin1234

Can you relatively easily scan negatives, for instance black and white negatives, and get a useful result? I have some negatives of my father's from WWII, some of which I also have good prints but others there are no corresponding prints.

sir_eccles

You can get flatbed scanners pretty cheap that have negative scanning abilities. They have a second lamp in the lid that shines through and special holder for the slides (3 or 4 at a time) or negatives (usually a strip of 6 frames at a time).

I have an earlier version of one of these



The trick comes if the film is curly or generally not flat, you get funky fringes if it touches the glass. But you get good results if you just have a few to do.

Steerpike

I gave up on trying to get good slide/negative scans from flatbed scanners, but - my efforts were 10 years ago and technology has improved since then. The biggest issue, for me, when scanning slides has always been dust. No matter how much you blow or wipe or whatever, there's a lot of small particles on the surface and because of the very small size of the negative, these become visible in the final image. The dedicated slide/film scanner I bought had a feature called http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_ICE "... The ICE technology uses a scanner with a pair of light sources, a normal RGB lamp and an infrared (IR) lamp, and scans twice, once with each lamp. The IR lamp detects the dust locations with its unique detection method, and then inpainting is applied based on this data afterwards. The general concept is to subtract the position of scratches and dust from the RGB image.".

What's amazing is, ! I only paid about $600; I think it is because they are no longer manufactured and are now considered a specialized item. They don't even come with Windows 7 or 64 bit drivers!

LondonSquirrel

If you have the actual photos then next time you're in the UK you could go to Boots where you can scan 100 photos on a CD for 2.00 Pounds. It would take a while which is why I can usually only be bothered to do 20 at a time. Snappy Snaps will put them all on a CD for you which saves you the hassle of doing the actual scanning yourself and the scans are higher resolution. But you do pay more, sorry can't recall their prices but ring any branch and I'm sure they'll quote you. Obviously you'd carry the pix in your hand baggage.

tonrob

Be much easier to buy a nice digital camera and a Tardis and go and take them all again.