Railfan Technology > Document Scanners

Have photos, slides, & negatives to scan.  What recommendations do folks have?

Thanks,

This gets posted every few months, the Epson V600 flatbed scanner has a pretty good following for most folks. Plustek has a strong following, also Canon, but there's lots of other set ups that folks are using, to a varying degree of success. I've seen a slide scanning set up based on the good old Kodak Carousel projector system, also a similar slide holder and digital SLR camera set up. However, your mileage will vary with that one.

There seems to be a lot of great scanners that drop out of the market every so often, whether it's cost or software compatibility I don't know.

There's many, many posts on this topic in the TO archives and also scanning problems, fixes and software for scanning in the archives. Curious how it works out.

Thanks for the info.  I searched in Railran Technology for Document Scanners and all I go was radio scanners.  Apparently a different search term needs to be used.

Try looking up photo scanners.
Bob

Other posts discuss the trade offs between personally scanning photos and using a scanning service. My recommendation: Use a scanning service like ScanCafe (or similar) and use the time you save to organize and identify your photos. You guesstimate the count of photos, negatives and slides, then ship the stuff off. In a month or so you can download the scanned images and you receive your material back. Painless, and you can then work on your article, book or postings of your best photos. A scanning service can efficiently remove dust and other defects while you would be starting from the rookie level. Other recommendation: Keep an eye on scanning service sales and promotions. 

How many documents, slides, and negs are we talking about here?

If the numbers are significant, there is no scanner I am aware of that can do a competent job of documents, slides, AND negatives IF you have a lot of documents. I say "IF" because if you are going to be scanning a lot of documents then you should find something with a document feeder otherwise you'll spend an outrageous amount of time on those. And if you go with a scanner that has a good document feeder, those aren't usually very good at scanning transparencies or negatives.

For the slides/negs, I would focus on a good scanner that can make archival quality scans. IMHO, flatbeds with slide and neg attachments are worthless but I'm also an image snob having come from a background in publishing and design. For current production models, I second the PlusTek suggestion.

But I would focus on finding one machine for that task, and another for documents. Decent all-in-one or flatbeds with a document feeder attachment are cheap and prolific and they are usually more than adequate for scanning documents. Don't get locked in to the idea of having one machine do everything. If you do, you will probably be disappointed and frustrated with the results.

Personally I have five different scanners to cover all the variables. One for 35mm transparencies and negs, one for reflectives and medium/large format negs, one for documents with a feeder, one for large format (tabloid) reflectives, and one portable document scanner which I mostly use for receipts and one-off documents. That's a little over the top for casual scanning but you get the picture.