Photo phun and memories

posted by Jeff | Tuesday, March 25, 2008, 3:42 PM | comments: 3

I was showing Diana some old Busch Gardens pictures the other day (the Williamsburg variety) and realize that I have many thousands of older photos I really wish I had in digital form going forward. Some of you youngin's might not remember, but there was this thing called film, and when light touched it, it changed chemically and we made prints from it. I think I've finally given up on buying prints, and I think it's time to go the other way, and make them digital. Back them up to a big ass hard drive, dupe in the cloud, and live on.

I actually have a Nikon negative scanner, but it's old. It uses some SCSI standard and I have an ISA interface card for it. That means I pretty much can't use it. There are newer models from Nikon that aren't particularly cheap. There are also Canons that are pretty cheap. Most importantly, they're all USB now, and they all seem to have OS X software. One plus for the Canon models is that they're also full scanners, which are useful for scanning docs for e-mail or whatever.

Regardless, the biggest issue is one of speed. Even that old Nikon I have, while incredibly high quality, was so f'ing slow. Scanning four to six frames took forever. And there's the dilemma that once I'm done with it, I don't really need it ever again unless I get one of the Canons with regular flatbed functionality. They're cheap, so I may go that route.

I have a bunch of CD's with scans on them, but I have almost no idea how far back I go. I'd like to go all the way back to high school.


Comments

Neuski

March 25, 2008, 8:51 PM #

I've scanned a couple hundred photos for the wedding on our HP All-in-One. The quality sucks but I was able to whip through them very quickly.

draegs

March 25, 2008, 10:47 PM #

You could always turn around and sell the (slightly) used scanner on eBay. That way you would recoup at least part of your cost.

Jeff

March 25, 2008, 11:07 PM #

That's exactly what someone suggested at work.


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