old negative film
 

:confused: I owe thousands of old color photo negatives, some back to pictures made in 1960.

Now, I wonder, if it is worth my time to scan these pictures and what equipment is needed to do this.

I work with a G4 OS X.3.4 I have still 10G available from a total of 20G.

I used to scan pictures with Agfa SnapScan1212. This scanner will not work for negatives, so I need to look for a specific machine to do the work.

Who knows more about? :(

Using Scanwise ?
 

Not sure if it helps - I have an Agfa e50 USB scanner and the app that came with it is Scanwise X. These do negs fine, though a bit more resolution than this (old) scanner has would be nice.

Sounds like time to buy a new scanner, just make sure it has a light in the lid for transparencies/negs and a mat to hold negatives in place.

I started a similar project a while ago.

I began it because some the negs were beginning to oxidise. I thought that by getting the best scan I could, I'd end up with an digital image that would outlast the original. They were also almost entirely 35mm. So I invested in a film scanner. Film scanners give a better scan than flatbeds. It seemed pointless to use a flatbed to save my negs from the ravages of time by losing some of the definition I was trying to save. Also flatbeds seem to have a serious problem with slides, or negs of low contrast (which is a characteristic of aging negs)

First I picked a cheapo film scanner whose maker (who I can't remember) promptly said weren't going to support the Mac anymore! Also the scanner could only scan one neg at a time - and this meant the project crossed the boredom threshold in seconds.

So I sold it to a Windows user, and got a Nikon Coolscan. Would handle up to 6 negs at a time. Good quality, with good "defect repair." Good scanner, but the Mac support wasn't too hot (I couldn't use some the batch functions) but fortunately Vuescan provided all the right controls, and more. In fact, I think I have better scan results from using the scanner with Vuescan than via the Nikon software.

So in conclusion, if they are all of the same size negs then use a film scanner. If it's trillions of negs we are talking here go for a good name despite the cost because the cheap ones will probably fall to pieces. Get batch processing. A good name like Nikon will probably issue a driver for the Mac or provide TWAIN support, but do look at Vuescan to see if it can help progress.

Finally, read this report. Hang on to those negs - just in case!

Bramley is spot-on. I also had the same project when my dad was dying of prostate cancer. I was given the OK to go through and scan 80% of his slides that dated back to the late 30s! Mostly color using Kodachrome film (the color was just as fantastic as it was when it was first taken! I also used the Nikon Coolscan and it was brilliant! If you set it up properly, it will do two scans, one to create a mask of the scratches and dirt, and then the regular scan. It then repairs the area in the masks. The results were fantastic. I think it was called ICE technology. BTW, because of the nature of B&W, the ICE repair technology will not work.

BTW, my project was completed and I gave a DVD with all the original hi-res images on a DVD to my siblings. Great solace for our first Christmas without our dad.

I too can vouch for the quality of the Nikon Coolscan for scanning strips of negative film.

One issue, alluded to by your "is it worth the time" question is the matter of tradeoffs. What do you really want with these photos? On the one hand, if all you need is "snap-shot" quality scans -- something you can throw on a DVD slide show, set up as your desktop background, or print 4x6 prints -- then you don't need an expensive hi-resolution scanner. A low-res scan (about 1200 dpi on the negative) will give you enough data for simple needs, probably go faster during the scanning process, and not take up too much room on your disk.

On the other hand, if you are serious about preserving every last bit of detail in the negatives or want to make large prints of many of your photos, then the process becomes more expensive, time consuming, and space consuming. If you only have a 20 GB disk that's half full, then you won't have room for thousands of high res scans.

A little forethought about your $, time, and disk space budget can help you arrive at the right scanning solution.

Went through the same thing. Bought a cheap scanner and was dissatisified with the results and the time-consuming nature of the task. Ended up having the scans done by a service: http://www.perksphoto.com/digital.html

The results were good, but I was amazed at how much the color had deteriorated after only 25 years on Kodak 5247 color positive film.

I could use some advice, too. Am considering buying Coolscan V ED as an alternative to using a photo service. Since my friend and I have about 700 rolls of 35mm negative film, apart from a bunch of mounted slides, it may just be worth the $550. My questions:

What size does the file reach when scanned at full 4000x4000 resolution?
I know the specs say 28 secs for each frame but, practically speaking, how long would it take to scan a 36-frame roll, assuming minimal intervention in terms of colour, contrast, retouching, etc.?
Any downside to doing one's own scanning? I would like to believe that the quality will be better if I do it at home with a new scanner like the Coolscan V.

One thing to remember about scan times (in particular with what Nikon claims for the CoolScan) is that they are for scans WITHOUT employing the Digitial ICE feature. I have customers who use the V and the 5000 and typical full rez scans take about 2 minutes using ICE (after tweaking and twaddling for color/exposure).

As for file size, that is easy to give an approximation:

4000px x 4000px = 16 million

16M x 3 (each channel of RGB) = roughly a 48MB file (uncompressed tiff)

How does that translate into printable dimensions?

4000px / 300 ppi (pixels per inch at max useable resolution for most printers) = 13"

Some folks find prints at 200 ppi are acceptable so you could produce a 20" print from a 4000 px wide file.

The file size will be very big. At 8/bits per color, 3 colors per pixel, 4000 pixels per inch and a 24mm x 36 mm negative, you will get a file size of about 61 MB/frame. But for highest quality, you will need to scan 16 bits/color and the files will be twice that size. So that's 122 MB/frame, 4.4 GB/roll of 36 exposures, or about 3 TB of image data for 700 rolls. You will also want a computer with at least 2 Gb of RAM to handle acquisition of 4 raw images of 122 MB each (assuming the negatives are cut 4 frames/strip).

As for time, the project works best if you have something else to do, but can handle a short interruption every couple of minutes. After you load the scanner, verify the preview and hit scan, the thing can be unattended for the 28 seconds per frame. When I did a similar project, I set up a script in Photoshop that dinged when the scan and some automated post-processing was. Once its done, you will spend maybe 10 seconds/frame minimum checking the image and naming it and saving it. Any actual intervention, even tweaking the color will significantly add to the time per frame. Add a little time for ejecting the negative, storing it, feeding in the next negative and you use about 20-30 seconds of your time per frame plus the estimated 30 seconds of unattended computer time per frame. On a good day it will take at least 40 minutes to scan a roll. But unless you jump up every time it completes a scan, the real time per roll will be much longer.

If you have the time, there is little downside to home scanning. Although I'm sure that professional scanners might have somewhat higher quality, units like the Nikons are amazing for the price and speak to the power of mass production to create very high quality at a modest price. My only caution is to think about the cost of storage. At full resolution, you will need 3 TB of storage. Even if you only burn just one copy of the images on to DVD and don't keep a hard disk copy (not recommended), you will spend as much for blank DVD media, as you did on the scanner.

Its a big job, but one that can be worth it.

If you've got a lot to do (and 700 rolls qualifies as a lot) look at the pro-grade scanners - much faster and with large-capacity feeders. The credit card will definitely take a hit buying one, but if it's a one-off project you can re-sell it a month later. See if a local service bureau has a used one.

A thought about resolution - you can always reduce later. The link to the Domesday project has some very valid points, but cd-r, tiff and jpeg have reached critical mass and will be around for a while. Although I wouldn't use tiff for storage - low-compression jpeg is fine, and much smaller.

I posted the link because I when I started scanning all the pics, I was also scanning some family pics that people wanted to pass on to their descendants. I wondered about what sort of media I should use, and saw the problems the creators of the Domesday project had had. Incidentally, I was one of those schoolkids!

I agree that TIFF and JPEG are going to be around for a while (the first TIFF-like format appeared with the first fax machines back in the 1930's - that's older than ASCII! - it must be a pretty robust bit of technology) but I'm less sure about the media.

After all, where have all the floppies gone? Gone to museums, every one. Well, that's not quite true. But the drive I had to buy (Apple don't fit in their desktops as standard, presumably there's no demand) will only read 1.44MB, and not the older 720KB. Well, there goes some of my earliest research data!

After reading the above link, I concluded that being aware that media gets outdated, and hanging on to the original media, where possible, were very important points. I'm sure that in the next 5 years I shall be forced to switch from CD-R to DVD to hang on to my archived data.

I've been doing all my Dad's old slides dating back to before I was born. Have done some negatives, too, same scanner is good for either and this is probably true of all slide scanners (that they do slides and negatives).

Mine is a UMAX Astra that was quite cheap and is of very good quality, but probably not of much use to most folks because it's OS 9 only. (Hence the good price I guess).

Excellent points! I'd recommend always keeping important files on two types of media and following your advice of using a widely supported standard for the files (e.g., TIFF or JPG). Your point about floppies is also very good one, my past is littered with floppies (400kB, 800kB, & 1.4MB varieties), floptical disks (20 MB), 3.5" Syquest (270 MB), DVD-RAM (2.3 GB/side) and a recently acquired DVD-R. Although I have old computers and redundant drives that, in theory, can read all these formats, I do wonder if they will really work in a pinch. I'm reminded of a crotchety old tape backup system I used on an old Vax 11/780 -- the "backup" function was perfect, but the "restore" function seldom worked.

Just as an aside, be very careful with CD-R due to the myth of the 100 year CD-R lifespan -- some people have found that CD-Rs die in as little as 2 years. Although DVD-R claim a lifespan of 30-100 yrs, who knows how long they will really last or if drives in the distant future will successfully read aging DVD-R burned by a long-extinct machine. Personally, I always try to keep one or two copies of everything on hard disks on my latest machines.

Media tends to become technologically obsolete long before it wears out, and the replacement is typically higher density. Keep copying to the next generation of media, including format conversions if the old one seems to be waning, and you should be fine.

You could also consider using optical film as a storage medium for pictures - the better brands like Kodachrome are proven to last a very long time, they have excellent resoluton and data density (about 40Mpix/frame) , and require nothing more complex than a light source and a simple lens to view.

Wow. This gets more complex by the minute. I really hadn't thought long enough about the sheer volume of data that hi-res scans can create. I guess I'll forget about digitising and archiving everything, and edit as I go. That way, the junk won't get the attention that it doesn't deserve anyway.

And yes, I'm going to work on storing my optical negatives better. My eyes, while they are getting older, are not likely to become obsolete in a hurry. Thanks everyone who has shared, and continues to share, insights on this thread.

old negative films
 

:eek:
Indeed, it's getting more complex, the more I read about this topic.

Epson Perfection 4870 has as well been indicated as a solution, being somewhat lower priced as Coolpix.

I realize, after having gone through all messages, that

a) the processing (scanning) time is a considerable factor and

b) storage capacity with my available 10G shall soon be used up.

So, what to do? The MAC G4/400 was bought in January 2000. Is it worth to encrease the HD capacitiy? And if yes, by how many GB?

:D

And least but not last remains _this question: How much interest do my children or grand children show for granpa's pics?

Hope to get some more feedback about todays questions. Thanks.

Go get a 200Gb external and you're all set. (for this week at least)

After my recent HD failure, I'd recommend figuring out a way to more quickly archive your files to CD or DVD rather than spend money to be able to 'hoard' lots of your scans on a new drive. You don't want have to do this project all over again.

High-res, high-quality scans seem very tempting on a "do it right the first time" basis. But unless you are a professional photographer, they are not worth the cost when dealing with thousands of images. A scan at about 1200 dpi (creating a 1200 x 1800 image) saved in a high-quality JPG is good enough for most family-related applications -- making a 4x6 or smaller snapshot for a photoalbum, using the picture as the desktop background, emailing photos, creating a slideshow in regular or HDTV, etc. For these applications, larger files only get in the way. At that resolution and file format, nearly 3000 pictures can fit on a single DVD. Although this 1.6 MB JPG does not capture "all of the information" in the negative, it captures 99% of it for most of the photos for your family's purposes.

After you have scanned, and processed the thousands of photos at snapshot quality, you can always go back, rescan, and carefully process a few dozen of the very best images at the very highest resolution for the event that someone wants to cover a wall with 8x10s of grandpa.

This is the tricky part. Chances are, if they are like most kids, then your grandchildren, great grandchildern, etc. won't become more than politely interested in your pictures until they are much older (possibly not until they reach their 40s and 50s). The most valuable thing you can do for your family is document what those pictures mean -- create the metadata for them. This might include who is exactly (from left to right) is in the photos, what they were doing, when and where the picture was taken, etc.

The metadata is as important or more important than the photos themselves because it contains the stories that bring the photos to life. Without the metadata, all those pictures are just strangers in an unknown place at an unknown time.

Best wishes on your project.

I'll echo this bit, I'm at that age where I wish my ancestors did a better job of chronicling/collecting family photos/stories/ephemera. My father-in-law has done a great job doing this, as well as researching the family tree all the way back to the early 1700's.

Currently, I'm using Reunion to collect as much information from my and my wife's family as I can. I'm getting each surviving family member to either allow me to video tape them recalling key moments in their past or to fill out a questionaire I've created.

I agree completely here, BUUUUUUT - I would recommend keeping a copy in a plain text file, not just stashed inside the jpeg image. Although it's more work (should include a description of the picture as well as just a filename) plain text ascii is the one format that has consistently stood the test of time. (and it's a lot easier to search) And while we're talking about formats, DVD is not completely stable yet. Remember beta vs. vhs? If you are really looking at archiving for the future I'd go with plain-jane ISO CD. (this format is a little difficult to burn on a Mac, but it can be read by anything) Although it will wane as dvd becomes cheaper, it will be readable on 5-inch optical hardware until the RIAA finds something better, or goes bankrupt. By then the next generation of storage media will have stabilized.

As one who has just archived my father's slides from 1938-1964 and prints from 1965 to today, here is what I did.

Scanned slides on Coolscan and Prints on Epson flat scanner.
Saved all scans as maximum JPEGs on DVD media
Gave DVDs to family members at Christmas.
In the process of saving all archived media to a NAS server.

If storage media changes, I will copy accordingly. I will back up the media to a new DVD every two years. Maybe even make new versions for Christmas. The extra copies will assure that fire would not destroy the digital record. Spreading out the copies is the real key to a preserved archive.

[QUOTE=G5from128k]
"The metadata is as important or more important than the photos themselves because it contains the stories that bring the photos to life. Without the metadata, all those pictures are just strangers in an unknown place at an unknown time."

This one sets the point to the whole story of doeing it or not - the scanning of all negatives - had I only made always comments on the back of the photo. Sometimes I did...but now, go back and remember each picture exactly.

Now, I have collected enough information. Thanks to all participants for feeding me with knowledge unheard before. :D