Looking to borrow a photo scanner

Projects
1

Hey all,

My parents found an enormous box of old photos, film negatives, and slides that we’d like to digitize. I was looking at the Epson FastFoto and/or the Epson V600 Flatbed scanner. The FastFoto is great because it is fast and has an auto-feed, which would save countless hours for the photos vs using a flatbed scanner, but it unfortunately doesn’t do slides. The downside to both of these is they are expensive for essentially a one-time use. So I thought maybe someone else has been down this road and has one of these (or other photo scanner) sitting in a corner collecting dust. If that’s you, I’d love to put it to use and would also be happy to throw some money your way in exchange for letting me borrow it.

Let me know!
Sean

2

Hi! I actually have an Epson photo perfection 3170. It’s not very current, but it’s a flatbed scanner so it’s reasonably good. Also, i have the slide/negative addition for it. It doesn’t have a feeder for the slides/negatives but I believe (i’m not sure to be honest!) it does like a chunk at a time (like 5 or so).

So you’re welcome to borrow it, I haven’t used it in a very long time. Rather than throwing me money, how about this. You pick it up from me (I live close to the space) and take it to VHS for a few days first. @psicman wanted to do a thing with it quickly first. After that, you can take it home, and use it to your hearts content. And when you’re done (it’s ok if it takes months…. =) ) you bring it back.

I’ve been avoiding bringing it in on my bike because it seems like more bumpiness that i really want to gift it… ya know?

So there is one gottcha. The driver support on it is no longer. That might be a deal breaker, but fortunately the amazing program vuescan does the amazing thing of supporting every scanner ever ever ever, and does it really well. So vuescan is not free, and fair, it is developed by a single human and he’s been doing this for many many years. He makes it available as a one time purchase or a subscription.

Unfortunately it looks like support for film/slide scanners is only available with the professional version which is not cheap. However i wouldn’t be surprised if my scanner didn’t show up as a slide scanner because the add on it just a replacement for the lid that has a backlight, more or less. (There’s also a holdy thing for the negatives/slides). The standard version is cheaper at $70 ($200 for the pro version). Alternately it is available as a subscription if you want to work quickly. The pro version is $27/month that way.)

Also he has a trial that is not time limited, but has a watermark. So you can try all of it to see if it fits but ultimately it’s not good for production use.

Also drivers are available for windows 7, but they’re so old at that point that i had little luck having them work reliably after that. But a virtual machine or a temp installation to do this would also be totally doable! I mean, it’s’ not like we don’t have computers coming through vhs once in a while… :slight_smile:

I did buy the program, some time ago, but it’s on my computer and therefore… well, you get it.

Ask if you have any questions… Let me know if you’re interested, nothing would please me more than having it get some use again!! =)

3

The Vancouver Public Library has equipment you can book and use for scanning film. Might be easier than transporting a printer by bike. :slightly_smiling_face:

2 Likes
4

Thanks so much for the offer @Omid! I looked into the machine and although I know scanner technology hasn’t changed much over the years, I think my parents are hoping to use something a little newer. I may have found a lead on a newer scanner, but if that falls through and no one else at VHS has a newer one, I may still take you up on your offer :slightly_smiling_face:

@ddq I had seen the ones at the VPL, and it would be perfect, but there are so many things to digitize and the scans tend to be quite slow. Because of that we’re looking for something that can be done at home, but thanks for letting me know.

1 Like
5

I hear you and I get it and I’m good with that. (My epson scanner i crying in the storage bin it’s locked in mind you, but i can barely hear it. =). )