The latest gadget in my geek arsenal is a Canon CanoScan 8800F film and negative scanner. If your family is like mine, there was probably at least one shutterbug. In my case, it was my father Dennis. He was always lugging around his Pentax 35mm SLR snapping shots of family, friends and whatever else was in the way. Slides were his favorite film development format; he’s easily got a couple thousand slides in his basement.
With a family reunion coming up this 4th of July (hosted by yours truly), Julie and I thought it might be a good time to start converting celluloid to bits. So we shopped around and ended up choosing this model after reading rave reviews. Who had the best deal? Surprise!… Amazon.com. We placed our order and a couple days later it showed up at my front door.
I should have photographed the un-boxing because it came with an array of adapters for various film types and a bunch of software including a licensed copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 (I know… that’s one version old, but it was free so who’s complaining).
After 30 minutes and a couple CD-ROMs of installation activities, I was ready for a test drive. I found the instructions straight forward and the scanner really easy to use. This particular scanner has a special lid with a light in it so the film is back lit when scanned and it seems to help a lot as I was impressed by the quality of the scanned images, even at the lowest res 300 dpi.
For instance, the one on the left of my grandparents Fred and Dottie was taken Christmas 1970. While a little dark, it was shot indoors without a strobe. I have done no color correction or touch up; this is how it came off the scanner… not bad IMHO. Some others that were taken outdoors are really fantastic.
The only thing flaky is the ArcSoft PhotoStudio 5.5 software that’s used to drive the scanner. It likes to crash about every other batch of slides (the scanner can do 4 slides at a time). Other than that, pretty slick and fast.
I’ve been working my way through a couple carousels of slides I took in high school and a handful of slides from another collection. The mother lode of my Dad’s collection is a future endeavor. I’m thinking some old photos might inspire some blog posts down the road, so keep an eye out for them.
If you’re in the market for a film scanner, you might want to give this one a try.
I came here from your reply on the HAL-PC digital camera blog.
I didn’t know if you might be interested in a color improved version of your grandparents pic
http://img160.imageshack.us/img160/2319/16697124vc6.jpg
One thing I really hate about these forum comments is you can’t preview them and you can’t edit them. Please delete my first reply with the wrong link.
Wow that really turned out nice! Knowing how many boxes of slides that you’re talking about, you have quite the little endeavor on your hands!
[...] The first tranche consists of six carousels with about 750 total slides. I’m using my Canon CanoScan 8800F set at 2400dpi and the scanner is doing a great job, but many scans aren’t turning out that [...]