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..
