Branden Mason
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If you only have a certain amount of negatives or slides to get scanned, without expecting to have more in the future, then subbing out the work to someone else with much higher quality equipment may be your best alternative, as it will likely be cheaper then buying a scanner and the quality will be better. The only downside is that you will have to send out those negatives and trust they do not get lost or damaged in the mail (assuming you can't find a local source for doing it).
I bought a film scanner awhile back to try to save several hundred slides from the 50's and 60's that were in my grandfather's collection. I just recently sold the scanner here on FM, as unfortuantely another member of the family took the slides and will not allow us access to them to get them saved digitally, so I had no further use for the scanner. What I bought was a Konica-Minolta DiMAGE Dual Scan IV which was for 35mm only. It worked great, as far as I was concerned.
However, the reason for wanting a film scanner is important, as to know what you expect to do with the images once scanned. Are you wanting to be able to produce large print sizes from the digitized files? Or do you simply want to be able to save the images digitally, so that time does not degrade your negatives?
There are quite a few consumer grade scanners out there, however Konica-Minolta no longer makes film scanners (of which I think Sony bought that part out from them). From my previous research at the time, there was a big gap in pricing from consumer grade to professional grade scanners, with little to nothing offered pricewise in between (a typical gap of many thousands of dollars to go from one grade to the other).
Do you know what kind of resolution you are wanting to produce with a scanned image? For example the Dual Scan IV I had would scan up to 2800 DPI (rounded down, as I dont remember the exact count). I think this equates to producing a about an 8x12 print size in a photo quality print. The Dual Scan IV was a nice consumer grade model, and was not a professional grade. You could load up 5 slides at a time or 6 frames of negatives a time (or with an optional accessory you could use the APS cartridge to load a roll of film.
On a side note, Konica-Minolta also made a very nice DiMAGE Scan Elite 5400 II. This scanned up to 5400 DPI and at the time had a good reputation for being one of the best slide scanning scanners available to the higher end consumer grade market. It recieved varied reviews when scanning B&W negatives though, with some reports stating it wouldnt produce print images of B&W over 11x14 that maintained a photo quality style print (however color scans produced slightly larger prints very well.
Of course all the film scanners by Konica-Minolta are discontinued now, but several models are still available online as new items, including the Elite 5400 II which is still around $800, which for a decent film scanner isnt bad in price. The Dual Scan IV I bought (before it was discontinued) I think I paid around $400 for it.
If your interest in a very good film scanner involves the desire to offer services to make a profit on, and you wish to be able to do scanning at very high quality and in larger quantities then there is the drum scanner option, which is typically viewed to be the best method of doing this. However the drum scanners are professional grade and with that comes a very high price (avg of $15,000 to over $50,000), but drum scanners can produce optically over 10,000 DPI. However these involve extra steps to properly produce scans, as you need to prepare the silm on the drums first.
For a little more indepth information on drum scanners, if interested you might find this link helpful:
Drum Scanner Information
The last point of importance is to have good software to combine with a good scanner. Most scanners come with pretty good software, but better software can be bought outside of the scanner. I would suggest trying the provided software first (if you get a scanner) and determining later if you feel the need to spend more money on better software. Again this all depends on why you need the scanner and what you want it to produce.
To start with though, you really need to determine a few factors in deciding if purchasing a film scanner is really what you want:
1. How many scans are you looking to do?
2. Reason for scanning (if it is to print, then you need to know the largest size you plan to print)
3. Speed. How important is the speed factor?
4. Are you looking for a film scanner for personal use only or do you want to be able to offer the service to others for potential profit?
Until you have a decent understanding ofthe true needs you have for a film scanner I would not jump into obtaining one right off the bat, as you may find yourself disappointed. Knowing your budget assigned to getting one will help also.
My choice with the DiMAGE Dual Scan IV was based on the following answers to my 4 questions above:
1. I only needed to do several hundred scans, with no plans of aqcuiring further slides or negatives in the future.
2. Reason for scanning was to save the slides digitally before the slides degraded to an unsatisfactory state. Printing was not really needed, rather the intention was to be able to produce a nice DVD of the slides to give to family members (coupled with the audio of my grandfather explaining the story behind each picture)
3. Speed was only important in getting it all done, not a high factor in the decision since I had a limited amount od slides to do and no set timeframe to do it.
4. Scanner was simply personal use only, no intention of offering any such service to others.
Final decision of course was budget. This all came out of my pocket as it was simply a project I wanted to do. I was limited financially and the Dual Scan IV at around $400 was all I could spend, but it served my purposes perfectly, and I had no complaints with it whatsoever.
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