I recently decided to try submitting some of my photography to a stock photography company. They asked me for an initial submission of 100 or more of my best slides as digital scans. This is a much larger number of scans than I have attempted for any previous project. If I succeed in selling these images to them, I have many more that might be suitable that I will need to scan.
I have a Polaroid SprintScan 4000 scanner which scans at 4000 dpi and 12 bit color depth. Unfortunately, it has no infrared channel based system for removing dust specks from the images. I am spending way too much time with the healing brush deleting dust specks from each image to get 100 scans done in a reasonable amount of time. I'm considering several approaches to solving this problem, and I would like advice from others about what to do. The first solution I've considered is finding a reasonably fast and effective way of physically cleaning the dust off the slides. I tried Rexton Anti-static film cleaner applied to the slide with a q-tip cotton swab. This didn't seem to work too well, and it tended to leave cotton fibers on the slide. there seems to be a fair number of small spots or specks, possibly something other than dust specks that are still adhere to the slide after cleaning with the Rexton cleaner. Are there other approaches to cleaning the slides that I should try that might be reasonably quick and effective? A second solution I'm considering if buying a new scanner with an IR channel, such as Nikon's Coolscan V ED with digital ICE. At the time I bought my SprintScan, scanners that both scanned at 4000 dpi and had an IR channel were beyond my price range. The Coolscan V now sells for the fairly reasonable price of about $600.00. Can anybody comment on the quality of Digital ICE vs. trying to clean the slides physically? Can anybody comment otherwise on the relative quality of the Coolscan V vs. my SprintScan 4000? Nikon's software for removing the effects of film grain, for example, sounds quite impressive. One possible disadvantage of the Coolscan V ED is that its slide feeder apparently only holds one slide at a time, whereas the SprintScan's feeder holds up to 4 slides at a time. This is a significant concern, since my main reason for considering a new scanner is to save time on large batches of scans. The Super Coolscan 5000 ED has a 50 slide feeder available as an accessory (but unfortunately, the Super Coolscan costs $1100, and the SF-210 50 slide feeder costs about $400 extra). The standard MA-21 single slide feeder for Super Coolscan 5000 ED is identical to that used on the Coolscan V ED, yet Nikon's website doesn't list the SF-210 50 slide feeder as compatible with the Coolscan V. Can the SF-210 slide feeder be made to work with the Coolscan V ED? Is there a third party multi-slide feeder that works with the Coolscan V ED? Thanks for any advice that you might be able to provide. ___________________________________________________ Dr. Paul Patton Life Sciences Building Rm 538A work: (419)-372-3858 home: (419)-352-5523 Biology Department Bowling Green State University Bowling Green, Ohio 43403 "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." -Albert Einstein ___________________________________________________ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe by mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], with 'unsubscribe filmscanners' or 'unsubscribe filmscanners_digest' (as appropriate) in the message title or body
