Scanner, Anyone?

Over the week­end, a friend and I were dis­cussing scan­ning our old 35mm era pho­tos. While we both have func­tion­ing and capa­ble flatbed scan­ners, they are old­er and are very slow. When scan­ning at 600 dpi1, my scan­ner sounds like the open­ing three notes to the Star Wars Impe­r­i­al March, with each beat rep­re­sent­ing less than 1% of the lines scanned. I learned how rel­a­tive­ly slow this was when using a new­er flatbed scan­ner at my old job, which I was quite sure was­n’t actu­al­ly scan­ning the image prop­er­ly because it was just mov­ing too damn fast. I sud­den­ly had one of those cur­mud­geon­ly moments: you dang keeds and yoor technolargy!

So now I’m in the mar­ket for a new flatbed. I’d like one cheap, but that can scan quick­ly at 600‑1200 dpi. I real­ize that with the pop­u­lar­i­ty of dig­i­tal cam­eras, scan­ners aren’t near­ly as com­mon as they once were (or were going to be). How­ev­er, if any­one has any tips or rec­om­men­da­tions they’d like to pass on, I’d love to read them. I’m cur­rent­ly lean­ing toward buy­ing anoth­er Canon, just because I’ve been so pleased with my old one (qual­i­ty, if not speed). How­ev­er, low prices and rave reviews have been known to sway my attitudes.

Even­tu­al­ly, I’d like to scan in all our old 35mm pho­tos (as well as wed­ding pho­tos). If I can auto­mate the files sav­ing process and cut the scan time down to sec­onds per pho­to, that will be much more like­ly to happen.

1 — This is, by my cal­cu­la­tions for a 3“x5” pho­to, rough­ly equiv­a­lent to an image tak­en with a 5 Mega pix­el dig­i­tal camera.

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Categorized as Geek, Life

By Jason Coleman

Structural engineer and technical content manager Bentley Systems by day. Geeky father and husband all the rest of time.

4 comments

  1. Nope. I’ve real­ly kind of held of look­ing for the time being. It’s been pushed down on this list, as we’ve been focus­ing finan­cial efforts on oth­er fronts. How­ev­er, it’s in the back of my mind and I’m still look­ing to see what’s out there. I’m still think­ing a rel­a­tive­ly cheap Canon or HP.

  2. I’ve seen some at Sta­ples that look pret­ty cool. They’ve got built-in negative/slide slots and one even had a place to put a stack of (I think 3“x4” ish) pho­tographs in it. I’m a lit­tle afraid of those jack of all trade devices, though.

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