DIY scanning

After paying $14 for scans at Keeble & Shuchat, I am looking into other scanning options.

Stanford's Meyer Library has flatbed scanners, so today I am testing out their film scanning attachment. So far, it looks like there are some sharpness issues. It also takes about 4 minutes per image to scan at 4800 dpi. It's a more reasonable at lower resolutions, but it'll still be time-consuming to scan an entire roll.

Negatives: Meyer vs. Snapfish

Snapfish

Meyer, backlight correction off, 800 dpi

Meyer

Color doesn't seem to be as nice in the Meyer scan. Note that this was using the default scan settings, with "unsharp mask" off, plus "backlight correction" on.

UPDATE: Turns out "backlight correction" is not for correcting the color temperature of the scanner's backlight (which is what I thought it was). It's actually for the scanner auto-exposure to correct for backlit images.

I tried a new set of scans with "backlight correction" turned off. Colors are a little different. It also looks less sharp. I think that's because it's scanned at 800 dpi, whereas the original Meyer scan was 3200 dpi and then shrunk before posting online - there may be some sharpening in the resize algorithm.

I haven't included the new scans with the purple flower images because the difference there isn't noticeable.

Snapfish

Meyer

Although the Meyer scan is at a higher resolution (3200 dpi = 13 MP) than the Snapfish scan (1060 dpi = 1.6 MP), it's not any clearer. Noise is better, though. You can also see a new piece of dust - it's going to be hard to control that sort of thing.

Slides: Meyer vs. Keeble & Shuchat

Keeble & Shuchat

Meyer

It's hard to compare things like color saturation without considering scan settings, but I'm not particularly keen on figuring that out. So I think it's fair to compare as-received K&S scans against default-setting Meyer scans. And K&S wins there.

I'll be reiterating this in a future post, but it bears repeating: the colors in the physical slides are AMAZING and inadequately captured by the computer monitor.

Keeble & Shuchat

Meyer

This is a 6 MP (2200 dpi) K&S scan vs. a 28 MP (4800 dpi) Meyer scan. Clearly, resolution is not the limiting factor here. This also begs the question: would the cheaper ($7) low-resolution (1.6 MP) scans from K&S be just as appropriate for my needs?

Conclusions

Given how cheap Snapfish is, it makes no sense to scan negatives at Meyer.

It seems that Meyer scans are only good up to 1.6 MP (800 dpi). Beyond that, scanner issues limit image quality.

Meyer vs. K&S? I'll have to see how long it actually takes to scan an entire roll. Could be 15 min., could be 40. Somewhere in the middle, it makes more sense to just pay the $7 for their 1.6 MP scans.

UPDATE: During my re-scan of the images (to not use "Backlight correction"), I timed the process. Scanner takes 6 minutes to scan 5 images at 800 dpi (producing 1100 x 700 images), and it takes me 1 minute to change out strips. This would come out to 50 minutes to scan 36 frames. Not worth it.