How To get your film prints on your computer
ok so im 17 and i was born with all this digital stuff i have a digital slr and i am getting a film slr tommrow and i was just wondering if i get my film prints printed at like cvs in 4x6 and then scan them on my computer in photo mode will i lose quality when i try to blow them up and put on my smugmug site, and what do you guys do with your film prints?
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About 15 years ago people did indeed print from film and then use a flatbed opaque scanner to create a digital file. The quality is good enough to share on the Internet and such but yes, you tend to loose quality and no, you cannot expect to enlarge from the resulting files.
Some Epson and Canon flatbed scanners have transparency and film negative scanning capabilities.
The Epson V500 and V700 are pretty popular, but the V700 costs as much as some dSLRs.
You can also have your film scanned by a service, often your film processor offers the service.
You can purchase dedicated film scanners, but I think only Nikon scanners are left in the high-quality market (expensive), unless you want to consider drum scanners (extremely expensive).
Unfortunately, sooner or later you are going to regret not using a digital P&S, advanced digicam or digital SLR for most tasks, so my recommendation is not to use the film camera too much and just use your favorite film processor (like a pharmacy or "xmart" supersore) scanning service for the short term. In the long run purchasing the digital camera will save money and produce better overall images for digital purposes.
Moderator of the Cameras and Accessories forums
The quality may not be perfect, but it ought to be halfway decent, and later on you can pick out a few keepers and have those scanned at high quality.
I think it is great that you want to continue to appreciate film, regardless that we are in the digital medium era.
I think if you want to use film to experiment with the developmental processing that goes into film, that's the way to go. But if you are just going to use CVS to print them out, then you are really better off with just digital.
www.tednghiem.com
Despite some vicious rumors to the contrary, film is not dead. And as long as young photographers like yourself keep picking up and using film cameras it will continue to live on for many many years to come.
I wouldn't bother scanning prints unless you just want to post snaps on the web, or have no alternative. You're not going to get a very good quality image to work with compared to a high-resolution scan of a negative.
Most of your local one-hour type photo processing places can scan your negatives to a CD. They may not be high-res scans though. If you're going to the expense and work of shooting film it doesn't make sense to me to go cheap on digitizing it. If you're serious about your photography I highly recommend taking your film to a professional processing shop; they aren't any more expensive (generally) than the one-hour shops and the quality is going to be better.
If you decide to scan yourself there are quite a few good options, none of which are particularly inexpensive up front. I just got back into shooting film myself and have been shopping around for scanners. I own a CanoScan 4400F which does a decent job of scanning, it's just a royal pain to work with the film tray.
The Epson 4490 gets good reviews. It's a flatbed scanner and can handle both 35mm negatives and slides as well as medium format 120 negatives. It runs around $100
PlusTek 7000 series dedicated scanners start at around $200 and go upwards of $500.
The Nikon CoolScans start at $500 and it gets increasingly painful in the wallet from there on up.
Minolta DiMAGE Scan Dual IVs can be found on eBay. They're no longer in production (Minolta is no more), but have a solid repuation.
One quick sidebar regarding film... if you decide to shoot Black & White and use one-hour processing you can only shoot C41 grade films. There are basically 3: Kodak BW400CN, Fujifilm Neopan and Ilford XP2. The professional grade B&W films like Tri-X, T-Max, HP5 can not be processed by the one-hour type places; the developing chemicals their machines use will literally strip your negatives bare.
Good luck and happy shooting!
Pacific Image Electronics
I have one of the 1800u models from them but I have not used it in years. It costs a little over $100. It does a decent job but it is not in the same class as the Nikon models. They also have a higher end model, the PF7250pro3, that is a much higher end piece of equipment but it is in the $500 range.
Dwayne
As for scanners the Epson 4490 is about 120, I have no experience with that exact model but I've used another Epson which is now discontinued but wasn't too much more and had good results, much better than you'll get from CVS.