Archiving, Saving, Organizing Old Photos

fireandrain
Wed, 17 Nov 2010 22:33:34 +0000

ucsducladad: I got one of those inexpensive scanners – not the Cosco one, but from Amazon. I highly recommend NOT getting one. What they do is take a picture of your negative, it’s not a true scan. The colors are off, the entire image isn’t captured. The one I had, when dust got into the scanner there was no way to get it out so the “scans” were marred with spots. I returned it.

I bought a Canon 8800F, very highly rated on Amazon. It took forever to scan in all my negatives, but I did. Dust was still an issue, but nothing like the cheap scanner.

One reason I’m glad I did it myself is that as many as 40% of my negatives were not worth scanning in. Bad quality lighting, closed eyes, duplicates, etc. – I took a lot of bad pictures over the years. I would have hated to pay for those if I had used an outside firm. I also had the fear of my images being lost – one of the scanning companies had a fire and lost a lot of people’s negatives.