I bought an HP OfficeJet Pro 8620, because it works with their Instant Ink program, and it scans & prints double-sided. The printer communicates with HP directly, and they send you ink automatically before you need it. I know it's a bit Big Brother, but all you pay is $10/mo for up to 300 prints. You can roll over up to 300 prints too. My wife is a teacher and is always printing up 30 copies of something, but what I love is that I can print 8-1/2 x 11 full color prints for the same price as a sheet of b&w text.
Oh, and since HP is paying the tab for the ink, the cartridges are filled to the top and last a really long time.
I do realize that this printer is not built anything like the tanks HP built in the 80's, but hopefully this one will last long enough that it pays for itself. So far so good.
bw79st wrote:
I will assume there are a good portion of family photos in the batch. Whether they have artistic value, or not, is not important. They are documents that future generations would love to see many years from now. If you make the decision to scan these photos it just may be the last time anyone will digitize them and there is always the possibility that someone else will discard your originals in the future. Do the best work you know how to do right from the outset. I have been lucky enough to get a second shot at family photos long after I learned what I really needed to do, so those early 350k sized scans will not be the final word.
Now, I scan prints, slides and negatives as DNG files. I opt for large sized files as I have learned you can see a lot in a good scan of a small print when blown up. (I have a cryptic photo of a deck of a ship with no recognizable family members in it. My large scan enabled me to blow it up and see "Baltic" on a lifeboat, so now I know this was taken by my father when he arrived from Ireland on the Baltic in 1923.)
I also put as much info in the Metadata as I can. I may not be around to explain the circumstances of a photo to a 40 year old grandniece.
The software that comes with a scanner may not offer DNG as an option, but I use Vuescan, which does. Vuescan also offers more facilities for adjusting the scan image. It has the added benefit of working with every scanner and having one learning curve for any scanner you may buy in the future.
I will assume there are a good portion of family p... (
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I agree with you 100%. I did my scans as TIFF using 2400dpi. I tried 3600 (the maximum optical resolution of the scanner) but did not see any difference - except that the scans took much longer. You never really know what you will be able to pull out of a scanned photo. I managed to find the very first picture I ever took of my wife - she was 13, and I was 16. She was way off to the side of a picture that I scanned from a Plus-X negative. The resolution was so nice that I was able to crop out the rest of the photo and still have a very decent shot.
Given the low cost of storage these days, there is very little reason not to scan at the highest resolution that makes sense, and save to a lossless format.
One other point. Many of my color negatives and slides have already faded and color-shifted. You never really know how much longer they will last. Best to produce the best scans you can now, before it's too late.
I just finished scanning about 10k 35mm negatives and slides using a Plustek Opticfilm 7600i Ai scanner with the included SilverFast software. I am very impressed with the results. It took a lot of time, and you still have to go back to crop and adjust the photos, but if the quality is there in the original, the Plustek does a very good job of pulling it out.
I got mine used on eBay for about $150. That's a far cry from what you would spend to have them scanned for you, and you remain in control of the process when you do it yourself. I have heard mixed reviews about almost every scanning service out there.
Plustek support was also very helpful when I ran into difficulties.