My New Toy
I just bought the HP PhotoSmart (HP5100C) photo scanner and boy is it way cool! It's specifically designed to do photos - it's not a flatbed - but it does photos, 35mm slides and 35mm negatives extremely well. Check these out:
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This was scanned from the 35mm negative, rescaled and converted to JPEG with Photoshop - no other manipulation. |
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This was scanned with a flatbed scanner from the photo print and converted to JPEG with Photoshop - no other manipulation. |
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This is the scan of the photo print tweaked for color and contrast and then converted to JPEG with Photoshop |
After using Photoshop to tweak the print-scanned picture, it comes out pretty good, but a little saturated in some colors. The image scanned directly from negative, though, looks very good with no manipulation at all direct from the scan, and personally I think has a more life-like color to it. The scan from negative is also a lot sharper than the scan from print. A lot of my scans so far have actually looked better than even the photo prints!
It's also a lot more economical than using PhotoCD; the best prices I've seen on getting film converted to PhotoCD are about $5/picture - at $500 for the scanner, after only 100 scans, I'll have saved the cost of the scanner by not getting all those negatives put on PhotoCD! Pretty cool!
The installation was a snap; I plugged the SCSI card into the machine (I actually had some problems at first because I tried to plug it into my existing SCSI bus, but it just wasn't quite happy that way), plugged the scanner in and installed the software and -ping- everything worked! That's the way computers should be!
If you take a lot of pictures and like to have a digital version of them, take a look at this scanner. It's more expensive than a comparable flatbed, but the ability to do scans direct from your negatives is awesome.