Hi

I have decided to digitize my picture collection (20 years worth). As many do I own a mixture of slides, negatives, and prints (just the slides are over 1,000). I would like to find a scanner that handles all this in a speedy fashion and preferably several pictures at the time. I find scanners like the ScanMaker 5 and the Agfa DuoScan 1200 interesting but I am concerned with the quality of the results for slides and negatives. Is there a 'jack of the three trades' that produces very good to excellent results at about $1,500.00 or less?

Thanks for the help.

-- Carlos Solis (carlosrsolis@yahoo.com), January 01, 2000

Answers

You'll do far better to get a dedicated film scanner and a decent- quality flatbed rather than trying to find one unit to do everything. For normal-sized prints (up to 5x7), the HP Photosmart scanner does an amazingly good job of being that jack of all trades, and is very cheap at about $500. It's a USB device, and only works on PCs though, so if you either have an older PC or a Mac, you're out of luck. Only other note I can think to make is that that's a LOT of slides, be prepared to be *very* patient and perservering!

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), January 03, 2000.