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Lidl photo scanner

richardr

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Lidl are offering a scanner to scan pictures from negatives and transparencies to digital format for £60 which is dirt cheap. Has anyone any idea whether how well it works, if it works at all? My daughter and I have previously bought cheap scanners purporting to do this job which simply didn't work.
 
I've spent a lot of time on this in the past, but not recently. I'd guess you'll get something out of it, probably not good.

Scanning negs & slides requires a high quality scanner, decent software and a lot of skill. Unless you're very lucky.

Prints and slides are a lot easier. And slides also need a high quality scanner. But there's still a lot of work involved in getting the colours right as the fading isn't consistent across the dyes. Some slides, like Kodachrome, hardy fade at all, but a badly processed E6 slide film often has as serious colour issues as a print.

Negs seem to retain colour better, but... there's always the colour mask to mess you around.

Personally I wouldn't bother. But it may surprise you.
 
I've spent a lot of time on this in the past, but not recently. I'd guess you'll get something out of it, probably not good.

Scanning negs & slides requires a high quality scanner, decent software and a lot of skill. Unless you're very lucky.

Prints and slides are a lot easier. And slides also need a high quality scanner. But there's still a lot of work involved in getting the colours right as the fading isn't consistent across the dyes. Some slides, like Kodachrome, hardy fade at all, but a badly processed E6 slide film often has as serious colour issues as a print.

Negs seem to retain colour better, but... there's always the colour mask to mess you around.

Personally I wouldn't bother. But it may surprise you.
Thanks, Kev. That's what I thought, but it's a job I'll have to tackle sometime. My whole life before I bought a digital camera in on colour trannie - literally thousands of them.
 
I use an Epson flatbed A4 scanner that has a negatives 'insert', it couldn't have cost much more than £60.
 
I've had reasonable success
I use an Epson flatbed A4 scanner that has a negatives 'insert', it couldn't have cost much more than £60.
I've got one of those too. Does well enough for my purposes.

(Now, if only my brother hadn't grabbed all the old family slides before we stopped communicating...)
 
Difficulty with trnnies is that the dynamic range is very large - much larger than the sRGB colour space which pcs use and many others. Printers, in general have even smaller colour spaces. Then you get down to montors, how accurate they are, and colour temperature settings. Then on top of that the effect of ambient lighting while you're working on the screen. And then... Printer accuracy, colour space and things like metamerism, prints fading etc. It's a huge subject.

Best thing for trannies is a dedicated slide scanner, with calibration for each slide type (e.g. Ektachrome, Kodachrome, Velvia and so on). Then the colours are usually about right. But... Then you come up against hassles from the ability of the colour space you're using to maintain detail in the darker areas - not as serious on trannies - if they're not heavily underexposed, but on negs it affects the highlights... And so it goes. On and down.
 
Thanks to all for your good advice. I want the results to be as good as possible, not least because I hope to get some of my stuff published. I think I'll skip cheapie scanners and get a good one.
 
Speaking of trannies... I went round the back of Age Concern to drop off some stuff and a 6ft one answered the door!

Blow me!
 
I don't know what kind of equipment is available these days so it's difficult for me to advise.

However I have two high-end scanners here that I bought 20 years ago for scanning prints and transparencies for offset printing. One is a drum scanner cost around 15,000 Euros and a flat bed from Linotype/Hell (later Heidelberg) cost around 8,000 Euros at the time. Both these scanners have the powerful light sources which are needed, especially for transparencies. I doubt that a cheapo scanner from Lidl would be able to scan in the dark tones of a print successfully let alone a trannie.

As i understand it you need the scans for publishing/printing purposes so they need to be scanned in at high resolution to have an final output res. of 300 dpi which you're certainly no way going to get out've a cheapo. For home use maybe, but for printing, forget it.

Do a lot of research as to what's available at the moment before you commit yourself, and where possible try before you buy.

Depending on how many scans you actually need you may even be better off finding a pre-press studio to do the job for you. To get top quality results you need specialized equipment as well as a generous amount of expertise.

Don't want to put you off but just be careful.
 
I don't know what kind of equipment is available these days so it's difficult for me to advise.

However I have two high-end scanners here that I bought 20 years ago for scanning prints and transparencies for offset printing. One is a drum scanner cost around 15,000 Euros and a flat bed from Linotype/Hell (later Heidelberg) cost around 8,000 Euros at the time. Both these scanners have the powerful light sources which are needed, especially for transparencies. I doubt that a cheapo scanner from Lidl would be able to scan in the dark tones of a print successfully let alone a trannie.

As i understand it you need the scans for publishing/printing purposes so they need to be scanned in at high resolution to have an final output res. of 300 dpi which you're certainly no way going to get out've a cheapo. For home use maybe, but for printing, forget it.

Do a lot of research as to what's available at the moment before you commit yourself, and where possible try before you buy.

Depending on how many scans you actually need you may even be better off finding a pre-press studio to do the job for you. To get top quality results you need specialized equipment as well as a generous amount of expertise.

Don't want to put you off but just be careful.
This is very helpful. Thanks, Spike. The price of the device from Lidl is buttons but I don't want to waste a lot of time trying to get decent results out of a piece of kit that's not up to the job.
A few years ago I was quoted £3,000 for a scanner that definitely was up to the job - it would do my 2.25in trannies as well as the 35mm stuff. I didn't buy it because it seemed outrageously expensive but maybe I ought to have taken the plunge.
 
Scanning involves more then hardware, software plays a big role in there as well.
I have a simple Canon flatbed, the results are OK with factory software, but using Vuescan made a big difference in the result plus after a new Windows came out the old software did not work anymore but with Vuescan I could still use my scanner, so it is now more then 10 years old (from the Windows XP era) and still functioning on Windows 8.1. Vuescan is made by http://www.hamrick.com/ in case you want to check it out.
 

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