Slide scanner

[Arild]

i have an good old Nikon Super Coolscan 4000 ED.
I bought it second hand back in 2002, the days we all went digital :-)

How much better is today scanners??
How bad is this photo, which is a Kodachrome slide from 1986

I have approx 40 000 of these slides, almost complete coverage of Norwegian FLora

[Bent Hjarbo]

It is hard to get new filmscanners today, so you don't get anything better than the one you have.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

The LS 4000 ED is pretty capable. I run one of these units myself.

I have a feeder magazine for it and hook the scanner up to a dedicated older laptop (Thinkpads, of which I bought a stack for next to nothing. Put a small SSD into each and they run superbly, silently, and amazingly fast too). The larger LS 8000 ED run Silverfast and the smaller Nikon's proprietary Nikonscan which its quite good once tweaked to satisfaction.

I do batch scanning to a dedicated network storage device. Using the scanner set at maximum quality and highest oversampling, scan time per slide is quite long, but the scanner just potters along by itself in a corner and as a purely background operation is out of harm's way. Once in a while I retrieve the latest scans from the networked storage through one of my work stations, and process files there.

Over the years must have scanned 100.000+ slides from my own or clients' archives using the described set up. Earlier, when scanning business was all the rage, I had three 35 mm scanners running on separate machines plus the big LS 8000 ED, now I have just kept the Ls 4000 ED and its big brother for the occasional scan job.

[Les Olson]

The only way you would do meaningfully better is to spend a lot of money for the Imacon Flextight (about US$30,000 IIRC). 

[Ann]

Peter Figen wrote some very helpful notes over on Fred Miranda about the special issues which arise when you scan Kodachromes.

Kodachrome filmstock produced very deep blacks with a heavy blue component and the dark blue areas in the shadows become very apparent after the scan. You can correct those blues by editing the curves after doing the scanning.

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1503921/1#14147815

[Seapy]

How bad is this photo, which is a Kodachrome slide from 1986

I have approx 40 000 of these slides, almost complete coverage of Norwegian FLora

Arild, The value and quality of the photo(s), really only you can decide.  Considering the effort, time and expense you incurred creating the collection.

What I would say is a collection such as you describe, an almost complete national Flora, of my own, would to ME be priceless.

The example you offer isn't pictorially great in my view, BUT it shows the habitat, the form and habit of the plant and there is a nice view of one of the flowers. A few more in focus would have been nice but in the field that isn't always easy... My guess is also the later photographs are probably better than the early ones?  There are probably some gems among them too.  Ones own criticism comes into play and techniques improve over time.  This is a Flora collection, made in the field, not an exhibition of perfect studio prints.

Having digitised them... They need to be made available for others to view, Adobe Portfolio or similar perhaps?  The good the bad and even the ugly, if it has Flora merit.  In my view.

On the slide scanning side, my collections are modest. I have made pretty acceptable copies using my D1, (now D3) PB4 copy bellows and a flash bouncing off a whiteboard for lighting.  Doing it tethered to my Mac I can repeat, adjust and fine tune each exposure from my desk.  I also have a friend with a Noritso? scanner, a very expensive high quality tool.  He will scan individual negatives or slides for me with very high quality at about the same price of processing an equivalent roll of film. Roughly £10 for 36 - 35mm slides or negatives.  For a limited number that's not bad, occasionally, but for 40,000...  According to my calculator thats about £11,000.