What Is a Film Scanner?
Film scanners allow photographers to create digital copies of photographs from 35mm negative strips or slides. Once the digital copies are created, they can be transferred to CDs and DVDs, printed, emailed and manipulated with photo imaging software.
Types of Film Scanners
Two major categories of film/slide scanners are available: flatbed/film and dedicated film/slide.
Flatbed/film scanners are equipped with an adapter to hold slides or film strips and an additional light source in the lid. Transparency scanning is much more exact than scanning a photograph since the originals are smaller. Unless the flatbed/film scanner has an optical resolution greater than 2000 ppi (pixels per inch), it will not produce a high-quality digital image.
Dedicated film/slide scanners are more compact than flatbeds and produce a higher quality digital image. Optical resolution ranges are generally higher and the intensity of the light is more concentrated.
Scanning Film
Printed photographs tend to fade unevenly over time, creating undesirable color casts. Many old photographs have a red or yellow hue due to exposure to air and ultra violet light.
The ink used to produce negative film strips and slides is fade resistant, and maintains the hues and saturation of colors better. Unless the negatives or slides are damaged, scan from film to get the highest quality digital images.
Film Scanning Resolution
Resolution measures the number of pixels per inch (PPI) or dots per inch (DPI) used to create the digital image. Because negatives and slides are small, film scanners use much higher resolution, so the digital images can be enlarged.
Bit Depth in Film Scanners
Bit depth refers to the amount of information stored in each pixel in the image. Film scanners use 8-bit grayscale mode to digitize black and white photographs. Each pixel of the image can be any one of 256 shades of gray. Color film scanning typically uses 24-bit color mode, which means there are 16.7 million possible colors available to digitize the image.
Do Your Homework
As technology advances, it's always a good idea to investigate what professionals and consumers have to say about film scanners before deciding which model is right for you. PC World, Macworld and Amazon.com are excellent resources to get reviews and consumer insights on the latest technological advances and ease-of-use for the current film scanners on the market.
Tags: digital image, film scanners, film slide, create digital, digital copies, digital images
