How well do negative scanners work?

[sidewinder]

A teacher wants to use ours, we have a HP Scanjet 5590 with a quite hefty looking negative attachment.

Havent got any negatives these days to try though, so in anyones experiance do they tend to work pretty well?

[pete]

Not sure about the attachment on the scanner, but success with scanning negatives depends on how anal you want to be about dust and rescanning. The more OCD you are, the less retouching work you need to do in photoshop.

I have a dedicated film scanner (Minolta Dimage ScanDual III) and the results are very good if I take care to ensure the negative and scanner are kept free of dust, but it's still tedious. If you can keep a dust cover on the scanner, do so.

Just let him know he's the official guinea pig and give him a blower brush

[StewartKnight]

I was tempted to say they work by saying "I'm not going to scan this, it won't work... Im so depressed"

But I decided against it

[maniac]

I have an Epson scanner which does negs. It works well, apart from the fact it needs to be spotlessly clean, as any dust particles or scratches really show up! Also your scanning software hopefully has some smoothing ability, and some brightness/contrast adjustment else they tend to come out a bit grainy and dark. I've scanned in 100's of my old negs at home, and been very pleased with the results once I'd faffed around the the settings to get the correct adjustment.

Mike.

[ICT_GUY]

I have used them,
They are OK but you really have to want the images badly to be bothered with the hassle.

[laserblazer]

We have an HP attachment but the slides are slightly out of focus.

[sidewinder]

well the thing is that the teacher does actually have the photos still...she just wants to throw them out for some reason :s
I reckon she might be better off scanning the pics directly then as long as they're in good condition?

[Busybub]

Scanning the pics may be acceptable depending on the quality of the prints, and how important they are to the teacher. They will almost certainly be worse quality than scanning the original negs though (assuming a half decent scanner in the first place) as there will less latitude for changing colour and other image settings (as the print will already have been modified and had it's line resolution reduced).

It will take longer to clean up scans from the negs if you don't have Digital ICE on the scanner which uses infra red to detect the presence of dust.