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OK guys, who knows anything about scanners? I want a scanner that will do a good job on 35mm film negatives without breaking the bank. Any suggestions?

The Canon FS-4000 for $900 is supposed to be really good; it specializes in film negatives, but can be used for other stuff too. If you want more of a jack-of-all-trades that's also good at negatives, then I don't know. I'll look into it.

EDIT: You can probably find that one for less than $900; that's just the first price I saw when I checked on it.

*Scanners?

Umm to be honset I'm drawling a blank, never realy used the things

Robert Treder wrote:The Canon FS-4000 for $900 is supposed to be really good; it specializes in film negatives, but can be used for other stuff too. If you want more of a jack-of-all-trades that's also good at negatives, then I don't know. I'll look into it.

EDIT: You can probably find that one for less than $900; that's just the first price I saw when I checked on it.

Just to clarify: this is for home use, so the budget is less generous than it would be for an office application.

There are several decent scanners for under 150 clams us, and some good ones can be found in the sub-$100 range...

The one I am using is a Memorex 6136.

I've heard good things about HP's ScanJet series, particularly their 5490C. It does have a film adapter, but it's only for 35mm (which should be fine for you). I used to have a ScanJet, and I was quite pleased with it, but when I got my most recent scanner, I went with a Canoscan. Canon's another solid choice.
I've never actually scanned film negatives, so I can't say anything about performance in that area.
You'll be able to find pretty much any home-use flatbed scanner for between $70 and $125 USD.
I don't know if they have Fry's Electronics back east, but they'll probably have a decent selection with good prices.

EDIT: Huh. I just found out that Fry's Electronics only exists in California, Nevada, Oregon, Arizona, and Texas. I'm sure The Wiz or Best Buy is comparable.

I know that some people at work bought a Minolta photo negative scanner for around $600. I don't know if that is too rich for your tastes Darth Wong.

Here's a product review for it:

http://www.computingreview.com/pscScann ... 57crx.aspx

Darth Wong wrote:OK guys, who knows anything about scanners? I want a scanner that will do a good job on 35mm film negatives without breaking the bank. Any suggestions?

I had a good experience with my Umax Astra 2200, which had a built-in negative scanner, when I owned it. I'd still have it if Umax hadn't become a bunch of dipshits who screwed a good percentage of their customers with nonexistent support for Mac OS X.

Now, I use an Epson Perfection 1250. I didn't get the photo attachment, so I really can't tell you about its negative scanning capabilities. If you plan on developing your own photos with a consumer scanner, I'd recommend against it unless you don't mind shitty output. You'll end up doing a lot of color correction, and you'll most likely have to scan at an extremely high resolution to get a full 4x6 photo from negatives. Not to mention the huge amounts of dust and shit that will show through much more clearly on a negative than on a regular piece of paper of photo print.

I've never done any film scanning nor looked into the technology in detail but, at first glance, scanning film negatives using a conventional flatbed scanner would not seem to be a good idea. Most flatbed scanners have a real resolution of 600x1200dpi; good enough for full-sized pages but unfortunately getting reasonable detail out of 35mm negatives requires 2500dpi or more.

At one time I actually knew what I was talking about when it came to scanners. I'm all thumbs now. However, my dad just purchased an Epson Perfection 1660 scanner. It has a holder to scan slides and negatives. I've seen the slide scans and they kick ass. It went for about $179.99 at Circuit Shitty. So, you might want to look into it.

I've got a HP4500 but I dunno what the heck negative scanning is, but IIRC there's some addon for it that allows you to scan transparent pictures too.

His Divine Shadow wrote:I've got a HP4500 but I dunno what the heck negative scanning is, but IIRC there's some addon for it that allows you to scan transparent pictures too.

A negative scanner allows you to scan already developed 35mm negatives.