Slide scanner?

ajmasajmas
Posted:
in Current Mac Hardware edited January 2014
I have been asked by a friend to suggest a slide scanner that they can use with their Mac. They have over 500 slides that they want to digitise, so they would like something that is easy to use and can approximate the quality of 12MP camera. They have considered going to a photo store to do this, but they feel that given they have time it would be just as well to do it themselves, and possibly cheaper.



Does anyone have anything that they can suggest? They will be using this with MacOS X and an iMac.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    mrochestermrochester Posts: 700member
    I'm not sure if there's any benefit to a scanner that scans only slides exclusively. My dad has an Epson flatbed scanner with slide adaptor and light in the lid, and it does a great job scanning his slides. They are Mac compatible.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    oldcodger73oldcodger73 Posts: 707member
    The advantage of a dedicated slide scanner over a flat bed with slide scanning ability is the quality of the scan. Flat beds can give an acceptable to good image, while a film scanner will give an excellent one.



    I have a Nikon Coolscan V that's probably three years old. I'm very happy with it. I'm not sure what the Nikon lineup is now.



    One thing to note about slide scanners is that they work with very large file sizes so the scanning process can run about two minutes per scan plus another minute to save to the hard drive. So the friend of the original poster needs to realize that it can be a time consuming project to scan 500 slides plus it can eat up a lot of hard drive space especially if you keep the raw TIFF files.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    mrochestermrochester Posts: 700member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by OldCodger73 View Post


    The advantage of a dedicated slide scanner over a flat bed with slide scanning ability is the quality of the scan. Flat beds can give an acceptable to good image, while a film scanner will give an excellent one.



    I have a Nikon Coolscan V that's probably three years old. I'm very happy with it. I'm not sure what the Nikon lineup is now.



    One thing to note about slide scanners is that they work with very large file sizes so the scanning process can run about two minutes per scan plus another minute to save to the hard drive. So the friend of the original poster needs to realize that it can be a time consuming project to scan 500 slides plus it can eat up a lot of hard drive space especially if you keep the raw TIFF files.



    Yes I seem to recall experiementing with a high DPI on my dads scanner and one slide ended up as over 1GB file size.
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