Sunday, March 04, 2007

Film Scanners

Somebody was wondering what I'm using to scan the film. It's a Canon CS8600F. It's basically a hybrid flatbed/film scanner. It's not like the flatbeds that use some kind of attachment in a desperate attempt to actually send some light through the film instead of reflecting off of it. It has a second lamp up top that shines through the film. It can do 35mm, slides, or 120. It has very nice software to remove dust although you'll still want a good bulb blower if you don't already have one (Giottos Rocket).

It works, and it's not nearly as expensive as a really high end film scanner capable of doing 120, and it's pretty cheap. Then again, compared to a flatbed it's expensive and huge - it's probably four times as thick as my last flatbed. It's also not particulary fast.

The one downside is once your relatives find out you can scan slides at high quality, well, let's just say it's amazing how many slides they took in the 70s. And you can scan a set of four in, oh, 20 minutes... so if they ask, no, it can't do slides. ;-)

Incidentally, Epson has some very nice products that will scan things like 4x5 negatives as well. I might need to get one eventually if I get a 4x5 camera, but at the rate these products are getting better and cheaper I'd just as soon get something that does what I need today and not try to be "future proof".


0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Links to this post:

Create a Link

<< Home