Converting 35s to Digital

I have now gone Digital, Minolta D7i. I have many Slides and Film Strip/Prints to convert and I am looking at Scanners and SW.

Pacific Image has several models, 1800 Dpi and 3600 DPI. I would love to see some actual examples from these or others.

What has been your experience oon DPI needed.

What improvement do you get from using special scanner S/W. - Like LaserSoft Silver Fast. Anyone have any experience with this.??

Thanks for any help or thoughts.
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Richard - D7i Newbie

Are you ever going to print your slides/negs, and if so, how large? At 240 to 300 dpi on the print, your 1800 dpi scanner can produce reasonably sized prints ... but unless the price difference is huge I would get the 3600. We have found that the 2850 dpi of our Minolta makes very nice 12 x 18 prints.

BTW, unless you get a high-end scanner with a slide feeder, this will take a lot of your time! We have one in my office ... it holds about 70 slides and can be 'stoked' to keep it full. Scanning negs is even more tedious.

Richard L. Stuart said:

I have now gone Digital, Minolta D7i. I have many Slides and Film
Strip/Prints to convert and I am looking at Scanners and SW.

Pacific Image has several models, 1800 Dpi and 3600 DPI. I would
love to see some actual examples from these or others.

What has been your experience oon DPI needed.

What improvement do you get from using special scanner S/W. - Like
LaserSoft Silver Fast. Anyone have any experience with this.??

Thanks for any help or thoughts.
--
Richard - D7i Newbie

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Ken Phillips said:

Richard L. Stuart said:

I have now gone Digital, Minolta D7i. I have many Slides and Film
Strip/Prints to convert and I am looking at Scanners and SW.

Pacific Image has several models, 1800 Dpi and 3600 DPI. I would
love to see some actual examples from these or others.

What has been your experience oon DPI needed.

What improvement do you get from using special scanner S/W. - Like
LaserSoft Silver Fast. Anyone have any experience with this.??

Thanks for any help or thoughts.
--

Click to expand...

Click to expand...

Richard,

I would go for 4000 dpi that semms a lot, but is the real good thing for 35s. There are two machines I recommend: Nikon Coolscan and Microtek 4000 (former Polaroid). Both have good softwares: my experience with Silver Fast is that it tends to overdo things, and it is not the easiest to learn. Nikon has batch capability for slides, but is terribly slow if you use full possibilities. Microtek is faster, but the Nikon lens is nicer. Anyhow it will take you ages.

Fabio

I'm still using the good 'old' 5 years old Polaroid Sprint Scan 35LE to convert negatives as well as positives into digital images at 1950 dpi for printing purposes on A4. Negatives are harder to scan than slides, especially to get the right balance and 'feeling' between hue, contrast and saturation. Though now carefully stepping over to digital photography, I still do analog shooting, especially night scenes or concerts.

For the article 'Blackmore's Night' at http://www.xs4all.nl/~jimrais/ I used Fujifilm ISO 800 negative with Contax MT167 and 1.4/85 Carl Zeiss lens and then converted the negatives digitally. The 'Barcelona' digital images at the same edition came straight from Minolta S404. So you have here a bit - OK, not very fair - of a comparison, but it might give you an impression and samples of digital and digitally converted images.

Good luck.
Jim

Richard L. Stuart said:

I have now gone Digital, Minolta D7i. I have many Slides and Film
Strip/Prints to convert and I am looking at Scanners and SW.

Pacific Image has several models, 1800 Dpi and 3600 DPI. I would
love to see some actual examples from these or others.

What has been your experience oon DPI needed.

What improvement do you get from using special scanner S/W. - Like
LaserSoft Silver Fast. Anyone have any experience with this.??

Thanks for any help or thoughts.
--
Richard - D7i Newbie

Click to expand...