I would like to scan my K'chrome 64 slides of scenics and animals, possibly do some "minor" manipulations to improve the images and send them to friends on the internet or print for framing and displaying in my study or office. Any suggestions for a) scanner brand or specs required, b) PC software, c) printer/paper brand or specs? Sorry to include so much in this question, but I want to make sure all equipment is compatible and not run into a dead end. Am also planning to replace my PC. Thanks for your advice. LB

-- Luther Berry (lberrytx@aol.com), September 26, 2001

Answers

Luther

Price is everything - what is your budget?

-- Robin Smith (smith_robin@hotmail.com), September 26, 2001.

This is actually a pretty easy one: Nikon 4000 scanner & Epson 1680 scanner; SilverFast & Photoshop 6.0 software; Epson 5500 printer. And of course a top-of-the-line PC or Mac. Optional: two monitors.

-- Leicaddict (leicaddict@hotmail.com), September 26, 2001.

Most consumer scanners and printers come with simplified image editing programs that will get you started. The Epson printers I've used have produced excellent quality prints, using Epson photo paper. The initial cost is low but beware, ink cartriges are where Epson makes their profits! If you want a full-blown image editing program, Photoshop has everything you could ask for. In my experience, Kodachromes require a better scanner than color negs do. The HP PhotoSmart is good for color negatives but only rarely can I get a good scan from a Kodachrome, because of the scanner's limited D-max. The scanner is where you'll spend your money. Another option is to pay a lab to scan the chromes. I've gotten excellent scans from a local lab's Fuji Frontier, which scans at about 3000 dpi. These cost $10 each and are good for 11x14 or larger prints. Web-quality scans are often available for about $1. If you're replacing the computer, spend money on lots of RAM and drive space. Photoshop is much happier with gobs of memory.

-- Douglas Herr (telyt@earthlink.net), September 26, 2001.

Robin, I haven't set a fixed price limit but am interested in a quality consistent with my photo gear (Leica R8 with 50/1.4, 90/2.0, 180/2.8 APO, 280/4.0 APO and APO extenders). Then will decide if I am willing to pay the price required. As a general guideline, might be willing to pay about the price of R8 body for scanner and printer. Will that get me a quality setup or will the price be higher?

Douglas, One of my interests involves "doing it myself" so I have not considered having the slides scanned by a lab. If it were possible with K'chrome, I would also develop the slide film myself. (Did some B/W lab work years ago.)

My initial search efforts discovered the Nikon 4000 film scanner and H-P PhotoSmart 1218 (is this a scanner or a printer?). Have had good experiences with H-P printers. How are their photo printers? Thanks again for your interest and suggestions. LB

-- Luther Berry (lberrytx@aol.com), September 26, 2001.

>>> One of my interests involves "doing it myself" so I have not considered having the slides scanned by a lab. If it were possible with K'chrome, I would also develop the slide film myself. (Did some B/W lab work years ago.) <<<

OK, I can empathize with this. I started with digital output by paying someone to do the scans, to minimize the number of simultaneous learning curves.

The Coolscan 4000 and a consumer-grade printer should be in the right price range. I don't have specific knowledge of the HP printers but what you want is a 6-color model, not a 4-color. You'll get better color gradation, particularly in the highlights. One advantage of the Epson printers, which I am more familiar with, is the readily available 3rd party inks which are more fade-resistant than most of the Epson inks. If you plan to do B&W, the Cone Piezography ink/software system is har to beat, and is available only with Epson printers. And, if you really want quality befitting your camera equipment, get the full version of Photoshop and a monitor calibration device.

-- Douglas Herr (telyt@earthlink.net), September 26, 2001.

Luther,

I use a $400 Minolta Dual Scan (Low end discontinued 2400dpi Film Scanner) and a $200 Epson 870 with PS5.5 on my Celeron 450 and 200mb ram.

My experience is that slides require a much better scanner due to their greater contrast range. I used Sensia for a while to avoid the need for a proof sheet, but my scanner blows out all highlight while blocking up shadows. Nasty look. Supra 100 scans quite well on mine. Kodachrome has a reutation of being quirky to scan. Dmax of the scanner is very important. The top Nikons seem to get good reviews.

Scanning is a pain. If Digital ICE works on Kodachromes (???) get a scanner which supports it. Spotting dust in photoshop is easier than in a darkroom, but gets old really fast.

Resolution of the scanner is not as important as Dmax and noise. Who cares how many DPI you have in blocked up, noisy shadows. The whole film/developing/scanning/color correcting workflow is suboptimal compared to shooting digital, but since you already have the images, a good scanner with high Dmax and ice will save you hundreds, if not thousands of hours over the next few years, what is this time worth to you? Same goes for batch scanning.

I find the noise (looks like monet painted my scans, the blue sky made of a mosaic of color) has me resampling my images down and printing most at 5x8" or smaller. You can see how many feel a D30 pixel is easily worth two scanned 35mm pixels as it is so clean.

I have to manually advance to each photo. A 36 film takes 2 hours to scan. A 50 slide bulk loader for nikon allows you to set it up for max resolution and color depth multi pass scans and go to bed.

For scanner software I use Hamrick Vuescan, as Minolta's was a joke. It is good, but the Nikon SW shows Histograms, and allows white point selection. Vuescan has an excellent proofsheet function.

I have only used Photoshop. It is the industry standard for a reason. Obviously the celeron grunts a bit, especially when stitching up a 100mb panarama. Any 1Ghz Athlon or PIII with a half Gig of Ram should chomp through 35mm photos fast enough for a hobbiest. You can't have too much ram. An IDE raid 0 set up would speed up the loading a fair bit, and can be done in software with WIN2000.

I have a HP CD burner which seems a good way to archive, allowing me to keep the drive mostly empty (Photoshop uses a scratch disk a lot, especially with only 200mb so I need to defrag regularly). DVD ram will be even better but first they need to decide on one of the current four formats, and drop the price.

The Epson 8** and 12** printers are good. In comparision with the B&W darkroom I had before, a printer has a certain resolution limit (about 360ppi of input at the 1440dpi printing resolution on the 870). Small photos don't have that bite that a good small conventional print have (the ultimate being a contact print). The bigger you print on the inkjet, the better they look up to the limit of your photos resolution. I use Epson inks and Papers, and it is all bloody expensive, but these photo printers are design with a system approach to ink hardware and paper.

My overall feeling is that the control this system allows exceeds the limitations of the low end scanner and inkjet printer. A good custom print from the neg could be better, but the control is lost and is even more expensive. Machine prints from the neg have worst clipped dynamic range and screwy colors (no control) although the resolution is better if you look closely. 8x10 was always enough for me in the Darkroom also. To do justice to the resolution and color rendition of your Leica you will need to invest more than I did, especially in the scanner.

It has taken me a year (about 85 rolls of 36), 5 different films, and 4 1/2 filled photo albums to get a work flow which gives me my current results. I feel I still have a ways to go to get consistant color correction.

Unless you are willing to climb a steep and long learning curve (you basically need to learn a big portion of the graphic artists job), you may be better off getting your favourite slides custom printed on a Fuji frontier machine, working with the operator to get the look you want, expensive per print, but so is doing it yourself if you ever accurately added it up (scary concept).

For the web, 600x400 50kb jpgs (bigger is going to be a pain for others), almost anything including the slide adaptor equiped flatbed will do a decent job. When you resample a 1800x1200+dpi scan down to 600x400 and add a little USM it doesn't even need to be a sharp original to look really sharp on screen.

As soon as I can afford a Canon 4mp+ digital camera with a near full frame sensor and decent AF (~2004) I will stop this scanning nonsense. If you want a digital image anywhere in the workflow, it makes a lot more sense to let the camera generate them in real time.

-- Mark Wrathall (Wrathall@laudaair.com), September 27, 2001.

Luther

I think you may need to pay more - you will want some kind of good 35mm scanner with 4000 dpi resolution like the Nikon Coolscan or the Polaroid. The Epson printers are very good I have the 870, but this is still pretty impressive. I have the Minolta Dualscan II which does fine 5 x 7s but I rarely find larger satisfies. Unlike Mark I find the small prints are pretty good and are as good as a lab product, but for larger prints I find the quality not so good (I think this is due to noise in the scan). Photoshop is the standard so you might as well go with it.

It all depends what you want to do - if you are like me and just want to print up the occasional slide shot to give to someone, or indeed to hang on the wall then your requirements are not going to be the same as Mark who wants to scan the whole film. I never do this so my requirements are different.

You need at least 256MB RAM and faster is better for the chip, but RAM is the most important. I do not have any particular color calibration and it works fine really when scanning Sensia or most of the Kodak films. As others say Kodachromes are less reliable to scan which is a real pain.

Black and white is another game and you really need a dedicated printer for that. Some of us still think the darkroom is still the best way to get good black and white.

To summarize to get up to 5 x 7 using slide film I find my cheap Dual Scan II is fine, but to get larger prints then I will need to buy a better scanner - so you need to decide what you want. Scanning is not necessarily that much fun really (dust is a pain) but for color at home it is the way to go in my experience. If I want ultimate qualiyy on an 8 x 10 or larger then at the moment I still get a Type-R print or Ciba done in a pro lab. One day this will change and then I will happily produce 16 x 20s at home. Mind you - how often does anyone of us print at this size?

-- Robin Smith (smith_robin@hotmail.com), September 27, 2001.

For a scanner I use a Nikon LS-4000, and have used the Polaroid SS4000 in the past. Either of these will do what you need. Given that you're scanning Kodachrome, the IR channel of the LS-4000 (used for automatic dust removal) won't do anything for you, and the SS4000 is significantly less expensive right now.

For scanning software you can use the manufacturers' software (NikonScan or Polaroid's Insight), or you can use Silverfast (complex and high-end, but some people swear by it), or Vuescan - a $40 package by a guy named Ed Hamrick (www.hamrick.com). I use Vuescan and have no desire to change - it runs all my scanners, the images are great, and the support has to be experienced to be believed.

For image editing go whole hog and get Photoshop 6. It's the gold standard, and is very capable and stable.

For a printer, the new Epson 1280 looks to me like the best bet right now. I use the Epson 870 - a letter-size printer with the same inks, but I'm planning an upgrade just to make larger prints that are better for wall display.

For paper, start with the Epson stuff. They make a variety of surfaces, and their papers are pretty good. Later you can branch out and experiment with the hundreds of papers on the market. Personally I love Tetenal High-Gloss 264, a super-glossy paper with exceptional charpness and colour saturation, but it's expensive and a lot of people prefer something other than a super-gloss paper.

For a computer, get as much RAM as you can. I use a year-old 800 MHz PIII with 768 MB, and I'm confident I won't need to upgrade for the next couple of years. Don't forget a big disk and a CD-ROM burner.

A good monitor is essential - I like a 19" screen - and you can use two monitors if your video card will take it (I use a Matrox). Two monitors means you can put all your Photoshop toolbars on the cheap one, and have just the image on the good one. Get a hardware calibrator for the monitor (the stuff from www.colorcal.com is good) so you'll be able to trust the colour in at least one part of your workflow :-)

-- Paul Chefurka (paul_chefurka@pmc-sierra.com), September 27, 2001.

Luther,

One more thing to my previous post: rereading it I think I came across as too negative. Since moving to the hybid film/digital workflow from the temporary darkroom set up in the family bathroom I, have gone from <20 films in a good year to around 90 last year. It has given me a huge sustain motivation boost. The Workflow learning curve has been long and steep, but if you enjoy learning, and computors...

As Robin pointed out, I have to scan whole rows as I just get my negs developed and I need to scan them to proof. If you get a good scanner with a Dmax great enough to look into your slides shadows and pull out the info, you can keep shooting slides and just scan those you want to print. You should probably make the change to an E-6 slide film, as this is what scanners are optimized for (But don't you love those funky weird Kodachrome greens).

It doesn't sound like your budget is too tight, so I would recommend you invest in the best scanner you can. Printers are very cheap as the manufacturers know they can take you to the cleaners for the consumables.

PC's and ram are so cheap, that anything below 1 Ghz machine with 512mb makes no sense, and such a machine can be put together cheaply.

-- Mark Wrathall (Wrathall@laudaair.com), September 27, 2001.

Friends, Thanks to all who responded in such depth. Your helpful postings have given me much to think about. It is clear that I underestimated the learning curve, complexity, and difficulties in scanning/printing K'chrome slides. (And I am addicted to K'chrome!) Your responses also enabled me to see this before spending considerable time and money. My photographic interest is definitely still with film images. Does this make me a dinosaur or an old codger resistant to change? Hope not but I really do enjoy using my Leica R8 and lenses to create (hopefully) beautiful images. For now, I will concentrate on taking more K'chrome slides. My lesser interest in digital scanning/printing can wait until another time when technology changes may simplify the process and improve the tools even more. Will save this valuable information for reference when I again consider entering the digital image world. Thanks again. LB

-- Luther Berry (lberrytx@aol.com), September 28, 2001.

Personally, if you want less headaches, I'd suggest going with a Mac. You'll spend less time troubleshooting hardware/software problems, guaranteed.

-- David Carson (dave@davidcarson.com), September 28, 2001.