Best way to scan old film prints?

[SAWYER]

I would like to take all my old family pics my mom has and digitize them, is an average desktop copy/printer/scanner good enough to do this well?

 

[Madwand1]

You'll get better results from scanning the negatives, and increased difficulty / cost as well. Epson makes some decent flatbed scanners which do negatives as well.

Scanning is typically very time-consuming, such that you probably don't want to scan everything, and what you do scan, you'd want to scan as well as you can the first time.

 

[Billb2]

Figure 5 miutes per picture, with scanning, editing, naming, saving and burning to disk.
And yes, a slide scanner will work best, but the flatbed scanners with negative holder will be OK.
Scanning the photos directly is the third choice. Put a book on them to hold them flat. Play around with resolutions, they can save some time at the expense of quality.
All in all, it's very time consuming.

 

[skyking]

Let's reuse this thread.
I have a "4x"6 to scan and a decent scanner. This image will be used in a slide show at a memorial service. What DPI should I use? I tried the max of 1200x1200 and that is ridiculous. Maybe 300x300?

 

[bobdole369]

scanned prints at any size larger than the original look AWFUL. You should use the maximum resolution that the scanner runs its stepper motor. In my Epson V500, thats about 2000 lines per inch, so 2000 dpi is the max resolution that makes sense for anything. The advertised 4800dpi is a lie, like I suspect your max 1200x1200 is.

How big is the slideshow? You are going to need to shop the crap out of it if its like 42x60. Seriously - scanned prints are terrible.

To answer your question - since its essentially a document now - it makes sense to scan it that way - I would say somewhere between 300-600dpi is reasonable.