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old b&w negatives

A

auric

pfm Member
I have come across some old b&w negatives ( 6*4.5 cm?) all perfectly exposed and in perfect condition that cover the period 1946 through to about 1958. Most if not all were developed and printed at home and cover a host of social happenings within the family and as such mean a lot to me and mine.

The question is what to do next?

My first thought are to find some place that can deal with these negatives and produce something along the lines of contact sheets plus scanned images.

I would like to end up with digital images that can be passed on to the next generation thus giving them a glimpse of life that was so much different from that of today.

Living within reach of London I'd be quite happy to take a small sample into somewhere that can do whatever is needed and has a reputation for doing this sort of thing well.

So folks, any ideas, anyone personal experience of this sort of thing?
I am loath to let Mr Google be my guide.

Any ideas?
 
How many do you have? Assuming you have the time, at some point it may be more economical to buy a used Epson scanner and do them yourself.

Afaik many of the high street chains are still geared for scanning negs but it's fairly expensive as it's a slow process.
 
Scanning in the UK is prohibitively expensive, if you want reasonable (never mind good) quality. If you've got a reasonable number of negs, which seems likelyfor a 12 year period, then you will almost certainly be better off buying one of the better epson flatbeds and using that.

I've got a V750 which is basically similar to the v700. I'm not sure of the current models, but get one that will cope with two strips of medium format film at once. If you don't want to make really big prints it will be fine - scanning at 1600dpi will give you a half decent print up to about 10 or 12 inches on the long side. The scanners will actually go further if you want - to about 2400dpi real resolution, so a pertty good print of up to about 18 inches on the long side is viable from 6 by 4.5.

You may decide to invest in vuescan if you want to go further, but epsonscan is much better than the internet chat would have you believe and probably fine for the project you've outlined. It's also easier to make work well for batch scanning mf, which will be important to you!

If you've lots of time and money then a Nikon 9000 (secondhand only and above list price now) is the next step. Great scanner, but a bit slower in use.

Oh, make some prints for the 'next generation' too. They may last longer than the digital files and will let them understand how things 'used to be'. Actually, you probably want to make some nice small prints - a bit bigger than a contact, but smaller than a postcard:)

Mike
 
Epson Scanner +1

If you really don't have the time or inclination to do the scanning yourself, i'd have a chat with http://www.peak-imaging.co.uk/. I've found them helpful with queries in the past, and they do a good job with film processing. I've not used them for scanning though, but you can always wing a few their way as a trial and see if you like the results.

Taking a look at their scanning service for a sensible size output (20mb per frame) it will cost around £4 per frame for >25 frames. For 645, that's £60 for the 16 frames on a roll of film.

If you are considering using an epson scanner, i'm happy to scan a few frames here on mine for you to see what sort of quality you can expect to get. Drop me a PM if you are interested.

Cesare
 
sojourner said:
If you've lots of time and money then a Nikon 9000 (secondhand only and above list price now) is the next step. Great scanner, but a bit slower in use.
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Auric,

I have the Nikon Coolscan 9000ED. I don't find it especially slow, but it depends on what you compare it to. If you have only a few 6*4.5 silver B&W negs to scan, then I can do them 4 at a time in the coolscan for the price of a beer. If you have hundreds to do then you might want to try booking some time with Calumet to borrow their scanner / PC for the duration and do the work yourself to save some cash.

Cliff
 
I use a 35mm Veho film scanner to digitise - works with slides, colour negs, & B&W negs as well as 110 film negs

the LED gives a silvery feel to the B&W negs a bit like 19th C plates. I've been most impressed & it ain't expensive but there are more costly ones available.

Quite possible that some scanners will suit your fim size.
 
Thanks a million.

During the afternoon while wondering about cost, time and suchlike the idea of purchasing some kit and doing the job at home now sounds like it may well be the way to go. I forgot to mention the many hundreds if not a few thousand Kodachrome slides plus 35mm colour reversal negs and prints all neatly stored away (due to many years working at Kodak with film at staff prices:)).

Anyway the spec may well have changed to include Kodachrome slides and colour print fillm all in 35mm sizes.

So if something else springs to mind please let me know, I am in no hurry as the 35mm stuff cover mid 70's through to early 90's so a few weeks or months thinking about a sloution will in my mind be time well spent.

Last thought is what about software and hardware, will they run under Ubuntu Linux? I'd rather not purchase a windows machine just for this project but may well bite the bullet if I have to.

Once again thanks a lot.
 
I use an Epson V500 for my film stuff. I don't shoot enough film to warrant buying anything better - I've printed to A3 from a 645 B&W negative without any problems. I use the pro settings in the scanner software to give me a basic image for editing in Photoshop. I also think scanning is a black art!
 
auric said:
Last thought is what about software and hardware, will they run under Ubuntu Linux? I'd rather not purchase a windows machine just for this project but may well bite the bullet if I have to.
Click to expand...

Vuescan is available for Linux. I also use a v500 and it's great.
 
If you've got that many to do, the scanner will pay for itself very quickly (sort of).

DIY also allows you a little more control over the scanning - there isn't that much adjustment in the scanning exposure, but it can be handy some times.
 
You say you want digital files to pass on to your children and grandchildren. From what I've seen, its more likely the original negatives will survive for another 100 years. Files get lost, deleted, HDs crash, CDs and DVDs become illegible. So after you've scanned them, take good care of the negatives.
 
PaulMB said:
You say you want digital files to pass on to your children and grandchildren. From what I've seen, its more likely the original negatives will survive for another 100 years. Files get lost, deleted, HDs crash, CDs and DVDs become illegible. So after you've scanned them, take good care of the negatives.
Click to expand...

Quite right, source first is always a good mantra to follow. I have managed to keep all exposed images in good shape for a while and would think they will stand the test of time and see me out. The ipod generation demands the ease of digital but sometimes they are blind to the drawbacks.

Paul, your thoughts are noted.
 
cliffpatte, dan m, sojourner and others;

All good info, am reassured that vuescan and things work under Ubuntu.

I have had a squint at the Epson range and V570 pro and have put this on my list of things to think about.
 
PaulMB said:
You say you want digital files to pass on to your children and grandchildren. From what I've seen, its more likely the original negatives will survive for another 100 years. Files get lost, deleted, HDs crash, CDs and DVDs become illegible. So after you've scanned them, take good care of the negatives.
Click to expand...


Yes .

My Dad has been doing a superb job of photoshopping Gran's old pics from the war years, some before and some after.
 
Folks, I'm going to do this and the number of negs, prints has gone up yet again!

Just wondering do I need to build a muscle pc with 16-64Meg of ram plus exotic and bleeding edge hardware or something off the shelf?

All ideas, thoughts and personal experiences welcomed.
 
auric said:
Folks, I'm going to do this and the number of negs, prints has gone up yet again!

Just wondering do I need to build a muscle pc with 16-64Meg of ram plus exotic and bleeding edge hardware or something off the shelf?

All ideas, thoughts and personal experiences welcomed.
Click to expand...

depends on the scanner. For the coolscan 9000Ed I'd look at needing at least 3Gb memory.
 
a bit of muscle will be useful.

I used to use an Epson 4870, found that the upgrade from a WinXP machine with 2.0GHz proc and 2GB of RAM to an iMac with dual-core and 4GB of RAM was quite a jump.

these days I scan with Epson v700 on a quad-core iMac with 16GB of RAM. It's all a little faster.

In all cases I use Viewscan. Mostly because it works for me, and because I can't be arsed trialling other software!

Time is the thing you need most when scanning - if not in the capturing, then for the post-processing. A bit of muscle will make things faster, such that you have more time for post-processing or scanning the next image (or batch - which is something I need to get around to). Note - I'm doing 35mm almost exclusively.

cheers
 
Depends what you mean by muscle. Scanners speed is more likely to be limited by the hardware than pc/mac, thogh you'll need plenty of storage and time to let the scanner do its work.

Processing is more demanding, particularly of your medium format files. Again, try to get some standard routines in place that you could automate. For example, if you go for a V750 then for archive purposes I would scan at 6400dpi (use vuescan and either multi exposure or multi sampling - slow but gets the best quality once you get the batch working) then automate a downsize routine to 3200dpi. That might usefully include a 0.25 pixel guassian blur before resize using one of the bicubic options, then a light sharpen (this can benefit from being done on a per image basis, or at least per film type)

Don't expect to finish quickly and try, unlike me, to sort out your filing system first.

Keep up with printing!

Looking forward to seeing some of them here

Mike
 
Many thanks, time is not too much of a problem for me at this moment.

I am not too worried about image manipulation as I plan to archive as much as possible and along the way add descriptions and notes to the images which now brings the question of cataloguing thousands of images to the fore. My ideal would be some prog or set of progs that does not keep my images & data captive and locked into one application but would allow me to export my content if something better comes along.

Answers from Mr Google are helpful but answers for flesh and blood are well worth their weight in gold.
 
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