So I've got all these slides from 1991. I get permission from my former teacher to scan them at the uni. They have this extremely amazing Nikon scanner that is I don't know how many years old. It is so amazingly spiffy that USED on Amazon it is going for $5500! VERY spiffy.
I scan for a few hours last week, I scan for a few hours Monday, doctor appointments Tuesday in Las Cruces means zero hours. Today I get there about 11:15 (they're supposed to be open 11-5) and am told they're closing at 3:00. OK. Start scanning, it can do 5 slides (the most the holder can accommodate) in about 12 minutes. Start the first batch scanning, run out to car and grab burger and drink from Sonic (their onion rings are quite good!). Finish burger, get second group going. Rinse, repeat.
Almost finish the first box - scanner barfs.
When you insert the tray holding your media, it grabs the tray, sucks it in to the scanner to a certain point, then an internal mechanism scans back and forth to make sure it's registered in the correct place. That part is not working right.
So I abandon that box since it's mostly complete, it was down to some boring stuff, and the next box that I wanted to do was much more interesting.
The uni has a second scanner, a Minolta. It can handle four 35mm slides at a time. This one proves quite finicky to get going, but eventually it's working along. Well, it's not 100% either. Its main problem seems to be when it gets to the fourth slide on the holder. The holder advance is having traction problems and you can hear it grinding, give it a slight tap and it goes in and scans just fine. Likewise when you hit the eject button, it can't eject the holder without giving it a little tug.
But that's not all, oh no!
It's about 2:40, I'd planned on shutting down about that time. I figure I can load one more set of four, copy off what I've scanned while it's scanning, then all I'll have left to copy is eight more files (4 JPEG + 4 TIFF). The first image of the new batch comes up and there's something seriously wrong. First, it's not rotated. It's in a portrait orientation. And the color's wrong. The program has partially reset itself! It now thinks it's scanning color negatives, so everything is inverted! AND everything is rotated! I cancel the scan, change the two settings, restart the batch scanning, and start the copy of everything that I've already scanned, which is going to take 5-8 minutes or so.
The copy finishes, and the scan finishes, and my brain goes "That scan finished far too quickly."
Look in the folder where all the scanned files were to go: all that's there for the final scans are JPEGs, no TIFFs. ARGH! So now I'm definitely going to have to re-scan those final four images!
Can't win for losing some days.
In the realm of good news, by telling the scanning program to do color correction, it's doing a better job of doing initial color correction than I can easily do in Photoshop. But then I had an idea: what if I just said 'screw the color!' and converted the images to black & white! I did some experiments, and in my limited testing the images looked quite good in B&W, which will save a lot of time compared to trying to tweak color correction.
There's one horrible problem with using the Minolta vs the Nikon: the Nikon does an amazing job of removing noise from the scanned images, i.e. dust and crap on the media. The Minolta can't be bothered. That's one thing that you're getting for your many thousands of dollars more. I really hope the Nikon is going to work well on Monday, otherwise I'm going to be stuck with a ton of spot removal treatment cleaning up these slide scans!
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