What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of a Slide Scanner?

Scan When You Want

There’s nothing worse than handing over a stack of negatives, getting home, and realizing that there are negatives that you missed handing over. If you want to get all of your negatives processed at once, you may find that this process can stretch out and cost more and more as it does. When you have a slide scanner, however, you can process your photos whenever you wish. Similarly, as you scan them in yourself, you are not going to need to worry about scanning and keeping pictures that you don’t want. There is no film processing service that will handle that for you!

Your Regular Camera Can Create Slides!

While no one is going to doubt that digital photography has changed everything, there are still some effects that are best captured with a camera using film and the techniques associated with film. There are situations where a film camera is going to be ideal, and with fewer and fewer store processing film, it can feel like a lost cause. A slide scanner can allow you to do your own processing!

Keep Your Memories

Whether you are looking at pictures of yourself as a child, pictures of your grown children or pictures of your grandparents, there is a good chance that you have pictures taken with film cameras. When working on scrapbooking or a family archival project, you will find that having a slide scanner on hand is essential. The pictures that you are looking at may not be replaceable at all, and commercial services, no matter how careful they try to be, may end up losing your precious memories. If you have photo slide scanners in your home, you will find that this is not something that you have to worry about. Think about how you are going to be able to keep your photos in the right place.

When you store things in a digital format, you have the pleasure of knowing that they are safe. Even if something does happen to the negatives, you can still create like new versions of the pictures and they can be stored in many different places. Similarly, a flash drive is a great way to make sure that you are going to be able to get the right kind of security and mobility that you need.

Considering Image Clarity and Resolution

When you are looking at flatbed scanners and the issues that go along with them, you will find that the quality of the scan is heavily dependent on the scanning element as well as how well you can work with the driver options. The issue is that slide scanners cannot be adjusted to improve the scan quality. A cheap scanner can leave you with images that are grainy or unclear and even a high quality scanner can take some tinkering before you end up with results that you like.

Cropping and Editing

There is a chance that the slide scanner that you use is just going to be taking the image from the negative format to the digital format This means that there might be a fair amount of editing that you need to do before you can be comfortable saving the image itself. While there are programs that can make these fixes for you after the photo is scanned, you will find that some of the newer slide scanners are going to be much more helpful when you are thinking about doing some mass scans.

The truth of the matter is that film cameras have become almost completely obsolete. However, the issue is that there are some amazing images out there that you can capture on old negatives and using film cameras. If you have negatives that are sitting around, you will find that you are in place where you can bring them into the digital formats that are much more common. Consider how you are going to keep the images that you love.