Best Film Scanner for My Particular needs (coolscan/ epnons ect)

I have around 2000 old family photos i would like to scan and i can't decide which is the best option for my needs. 99% are 35mm (cut into 4/5 frame strips) and some 110 i think. More negatives may emerge from other family members as i go along.

Nikon coolscan - obviously very highly reccommended but it has its issues. Firstly they are difficult to get hold of new and the 5000 run at around £1200 in the uk. atm there is only 1 on ebay going for around £1000 but that is always a risk. with so many negatives i would be constantly changing the strips over. also there is a software issue, i dont own an XP machine, one vista 32 and one vista 64 (soon to be win7). how do the coolscans work with vista? i have CS3, is it possible to use this or some other software were some form of ICE can be utilised?

Epson V700/750 - this seems to be a pretty good option, is it good enough for my needs? how are they for scanning prints as i have a few of these without negatives? is the extra sofware included with the V750 worth the extra cost? these scanners are a few years old now, will there be any update to these machines?

Other - anything i haven't considered?

As i have mentioned these are mainly family photos and a few of my fathers amateur days. i wont need to blow them up massivley and none of the are professional prints, just a family record. i know im talking myself into one of the epsons, but i know the coolscan is a more specialised machine. the epsons seem to perform reasonably well compared to a coolscan 9000 when USM is applied ( http://www.photo-i.co.uk/Reviews/interactive/Epson%20V750/page_5.htm ) in this particular review.

Any help is appreciated

Thank you

Damien

P.s. - why was i unable to copy and paste this from word and had to type it all out again?

DTA said:

Epson V700/750 - this seems to be a pretty good option, is it good enough for my needs?

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You'd find it easier to scan 35mm on a Coolscan.

http://www.flickr.com/groups/74221125@N00/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/466058@N21/

DTA said:

how are they for scanning prints as i have a few of these without negatives?

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No worse than a cheaper scanner.

DTA said:

is the extra sofware included with the V750 worth the extra cost?

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Only if your use of them is advanced enough to make use of it.

DTA said:

these scanners are a few years old now, will there be any update to these machines?

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I expect so, unless they're discontinued.

See these earlier threads
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1018&message=28869925
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1018&message=32698090

Click on the "Show Archive" link to see the scanning sections
http://photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/

Thank you, the last link proved useful (i had read the other links previously). it seems that the v700/750 is not quite up to the job perhaps. according to nikon support the coolscan series will run on vista 32. recently the coolscan has been listed as discontinued on the nikon uk website. is this an indication of new models? if not would it make a coolscan a good purchase, even at £1200? i cannot afford to keep it and eventually will have to sell whichever i buy.

Ii've been doing something similar with my dad's photos--negatives of various sizes, plus slides. I'm happy with my Canon Canoscan 9550f, which has been replaced with a less expensive 8800f.

--
Susan
1 old farmhouse, 2 dogs, 5 cats, 3 computers

i have not come across a Canon Canoscan 9550f, and a search in google only yields 11 results in total (uk only) so i dont think i will be able to pick one of those up in the UK

I did this about 5 or so years ago, scanning several thousand b/w negatives, color negatives, color slides, and 2 ¼ negatives. I used the Epson Perfection Series 3170 scanner and was perfectly happy with the results. The actual scanning is labor intensive. I don’t know what additional software you get with the 700 series but the software included with my scanner was excellent for the purpose and by the time you scan 1000 negatives you can become quite good with it. I may someday go back and rescan the first negatives in the process now that I know the process better. I’ve also successfully transformed some prints for which I didn’t have negatives using this scanner. The newer scanners have ICE which is worth the price if you are restoring damaged photos. The quality of my negatives didn’t warrant a dedicated negative scanner but I hear that they are very, very, good. Dave Huss use to have a very usefull book on using scanners for this purpose.

I agree with most of what other people have said, but I'd emphasize how much of a pain it is to feed a couple thousand slides, one-by-one, into the scanner. So it's very worth considering getting an automatic feed scanner like this one:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=NavBar&A=getItemDetail&Q=&sku=430671&is=REG&si=rev#features

I don't know how the image quality compares to the Nikon Coolscan; I presume the Nikon is better in that regard. Still, I'd seriously consider the inferior scanner with the automatic feeder over the superior one without.

sacundim said:

I'd emphasize how much of a pain it is to feed a couple thousand slides, one-by-one, into the scanner.

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A slight correction the flat bed film scanners have film templates. You have to have your film in strips and you have to feed each strip into the plastic template. But you scan ten or so 35mm negatives at a time. That said it is labor intensive and takes time, particularly if you use the software to adjust each image. Color slide have a similar template which you do fill one at a time but you still scan about ten at a time.

DTA said:

Thank you, the last link proved useful (i had read the other links previously). it seems that the v700/750 is not quite up to the job perhaps. according to nikon support the coolscan series will run on vista 32. recently the coolscan has been listed as discontinued on the nikon uk website. is this an indication of new models?

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It's possible but it doesn't seem likely. They've been making the same models for years with few sales despite having no real competition since Konica Minolta stopped producing their scanner.

DTA said:

if not would it make a coolscan a good purchase, even at £1200? i cannot afford to keep it and eventually will have to sell whichever i buy.

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We don't know whether Nikon will come out with a new model or stop producing scanners altogether so if you wait and see you might not be able to buy one at all so buying one sounds like the less risky option.

Look into preservation of the negatives because whatever you scan them with today will be beaten by a flatbed scanner in a couple of decades' time.