Film Scanners

[sophiamf]

Does anyone have recommendations for film scanners under $400? I've been through several that either crop or simply yield terrible results. Example attached

Thank you!

[John Morton]

I started out with digital using a Minolta DiMAGE Scan Elite 5400 digital film scanner, which is dedicated to 35mm format. I had very impressive results which eventually lead to me embracing digital capture wholeheartedly. This particular machine is no longer being manufactured but perhaps you could find one used for a reasonable price. I bought mine new, as soon as they hit the market, but it was (is) worth every penny I paid for it.

[davidedric]

Sorry, can't help with your query. I have a Nikon Coolscan 5000 which are no longer made and selling second hand at about twice what I paid new.

However, I used to shoot slide film, and often quite high ISO ektachrome or similar. I have found that scanning at high resolution and viewing on a decent monitor is much more exacting than projecting onto a home screen. So slides that I thought looked OK don't look so good after scanning, but I am sure it is the original image and not the scanner that is the problem.

You could try getting one or two professionally scanned, if you haven't done so, to give a measure of what should be achievable (though I expect a professional scanner will have pretty good tools for noise and blemish removal, etc)

[stuck]

High quality dedicated film scanners are a niche market so even second hand they tend to be pricey, see these links for example:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_tr...at=0&_from=R40
http://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_nk...at=0&_from=R40

I don't have any experience of film scanners that are currently on the market but I'm fortunate to have a Nikon CoolScan V ED on long term loan. It generates 42bit colour depth files (each scan is about 128Mb in TIFF format). That's more than enough resolution for my slides, especially my oldest ones taken on a Kodak Instamatic 233

Ken

[loosecanon]

I find my canon 8400F flatbed scanner gives excellent results. I had a epson V300 that scanned negatives well, but did a poor job on slides. All scanners are somewhat slow when scanning at high resolution.