Scan, scan, scan
During the last week or so, as well as setting up the Mac mini, we have started a mammoth scanning session. We have somewhere between 6000 and 7000 35mm slides in the cellar, which we haven’t looked at for at least ten years because we’re too lazy to set up the projector and screen. The slides go back about 40 years – to our respective childhoods. We decided that rather than have them taking up space we need, we would scan them digitally and then dump the slides, the projector and screen.
So we’ve rented a Reflecta DigitDia 4000 scanner and some professional scanner software (SilverFast Ai with IT-8 calibration), because a test we read reported that the scanner’s own software is not too hot. The scanner is the only model we could find that can scan up to 100 slides at a time, meaning that we can set it running and it is busy for the next several hours before it needs feeding again – most scanners only handle 4 or 6 slides at time, which just isn’t practical if you have thousands to process.
At first we thought we might have wasted our time and money – the highly recommended Silverfast software is great for scanning single slides, but the calibration didn’t seem to offer any improvement over the other software package as far as colour was concerned and with the scratch/dust removal filter set (which is supposed to used the scanners special “ICE” hardware filter) a tray of 50 slides was taking nearly 24 hours to scan.
Back to the drawing board. The software which comes with the scanner, CyberView, was much faster – about 2 hours per tray, but the results were indeed awful:
Original detail of scan at 1x scale at 2700 dpi
Original detail of scan at 1x scale at 2700 dpi
After a lot of experimentation, I finally discovered that the cause of the pixelisation around the borders of objects was caused by the ICE hardware scratch correction and switched it off:
Original detail of scan at 1x scale at 2700 dpi
Original detail of scan at 1x scale at 2700 dpi
Yes, there is still some pixelation around contrasty borders, but it is much reduced. And when the slides are scaled down to fit the screen it is not noticable (2700 dpi gives about 3700×2400 pixels, which is much too large to view completely, even the Apple 30” screen, one of the largest available, only offers 2560×1600 resolution). At the moment, I can’t offer a direct comparision using the same slide, as I haven’t had time to go back and re-scan the initial failures.
If you have a similar problem, you can download the settings I finally settled on: settings.pdf (approx 80 KB)
Incidently, the examples above are from slides which are around 35 years old. They have deteriorated quite a lot in that time. The more recent slides are producing much better quality results.
October 26th, 2006 at 20:10:23
[...] And finally there are the many photographs and slides from our holidays and my favourite photoblogs on the web. We are currently in the middle of a marathon process of scanning in all our slides. So that is one more resource that will be more accessible to me in the future. [...]