Flatbed Scanner

Have you considered taking digital photos of pictures? The quality is amazing.

What do you mean by OS compatible? Which OS?

Most name brand scanners these days are pretty good, we picked up a fairly inexpensive epson that works well enough for my wife (full time artist). Suggest finding one that powers via USB, it's one less cable to worry about.

Main problem with taking pictures of other pictures is getting the camera lined up properly so as to not distort the image. We have a copy stand for large format stuff, keeps the camera in line and provides good lighting.

No personal experience, and there don't seem to be many good photo specific scanners, but this Epson seems to fir the bil. It will do up to 12,800 dpi.

OS = Mac/apple ?

they are ALL USB compatible, standard digital image, it isn't until you save the image to the PC that 'file format' is involved

Oops..
Mac OS.
rw

2oldman wrote:
Have you considered taking digital photos of pictures? The quality is amazing.

Takes MORE than a digital camera to pull that off.

I have done it, but even with a 16 mp camera there is a lot of huge trade offs in quality when taking a pix of a printed pix.

First problem is a good tripod with enough height for your lens to work properly.

second problem is lighting, rarely can you get away with using the camera flash.. Typically the camera flash is too close and part of the pix washes out and what doesn't washout is under lighted.. Had to use multiple bright light sources to spread out the light and even that takes a lot of trial and error.. Glossy pix are the hardest and finding the sweet spot for lighting angles takes time.

Third, I would not have attempted using a camera but the photo was to large to fit my bed scanner.

Stand alone bed scanners are not all that expensive and they do come in handy for scanning in not only pictures but documents from business card size to legal size and anything in between. We tend to scan in important documents to save to PDFs, saves paper and ink and can be easily archived on a external HD for redundancy.

Some bed scanners do offer an optional 35mm negative adapter, works for some folks and doesn't work well for others..

Look for a bed scanner that you can remove the top, not all have that feature, comes in handy for very large items where you want just a small portion scanned in.

I bought a separate 35mm film scanner to scan in my Dads, 35mm slides which are a "positive". Film for photo "prints" on paper that is a "negative", the colors are backwards from a slide.. My standalone film scanner is switchable for slides or negatives, not sure if a bed scanner is able to handle both..

I have even taken a few of the slide files to Walmart and had them printed out at 8x10 size, they looked fantastic for being taken 50 yrs ago (although I had to digitally cleanup and retouch the age damage a bit)!

I have also made an adapter which allows me to scan in the old 110 negatives (smaller than 35 mm in size), results were much better than attempting to scan in the printed photos.

Sometimes you end up buying several different things that do one job very well instead of buying one "do it all" thing that does the job half as good..

By the way, standalone 35 mm film scanners are also inexpensive and do not take much space and some can actually operate without a computer connected and save directly to a SD memory card..

Epson V-500 Photo has scanned thousands of slides, prints, and old negatives for me, and also just plain document scanning.

The software is easier to use than the HP variety. Canon software is also good, but the Epson has more features.

Caution: scanning slides and 35mm negatives is a time consuming task.

We also use an epson and it does a good job with negatives and slides.

We carry a Visioneer Road Warrior 2 scanner. A flatbed scanner is only necessary for copying from books and such. For legal documents a sheet fed scanner will work just fine. Small and compact. It comes with the Paperport software that will allow you to convert to a PDF document among other choices.
Latest model: https://www.amazon.com/Visioneer-RoadWarrior-Color-Scanner-Mac/dp/B00G2I9M4E/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1469839532&sr=8-2&keywords=visioneer+roadwarrior+lite

Having digitized over 10,000 images in many different formats, I have a few opinions on this topic. A flat bed scanner is fine for large prints (i.e. 8x10) and even medium-to-large format film (6x6 and larger). Flatbed scanners are not the best tool for scanning 35mm film. A dedicated film scanner will run circles around even the best flatbed for 35mm film.

That said, there is a HUGE difference between scanning a print and scanning the negative of the same image. The best photo papers will only reproduce about 300 samples per inch of information compared to 7,000 samples per inch and more for a dedicated film scanner. The color depth and dynamic range are also much better scanning the film than the print.

I use VueScan for both of my scanners rather than the software provided with the scanners. VueScan is updated regularly with new drivers and features. This eliminates trying to stay on top of compatibility issues with drivers and software from different sources as operating systems are updated.

Rob