A 35mm film is the most popular film gauge used for motion pictures and still photography. A scanner that scans these 35mm film slides is known as a 35mm slide scanner. While buying a 35mm film and slide scanner, you must definitely look at the offered software and features.
The slide scanners can be used for both personal and professional work. The personal work might not require high quality scans and most of the scanners might work well. For example, the Kodak Picture CD scan works well for normal day-to-day photography. Typically, you need to send the negative films to a Kodak Kiosk and would get back the photographs in digitized form burned on the CD. The CD also contains software from Kodak so that the pictures can be viewed on your computer. However, if you are involved in desktop, in house, or pre-press publishing, then this scanner must be avoided, because it removes digital information so that the files are compressed.
Another big company in the scanner business is Nikon. The slide scanner range made by Nikon is called Nikon CoolScan 35mm negative film and slide scanner. These devices come with Nikon software but they might work better with SilverFast scanner software from LaserSoft Imaging. Moreover this software can also be helpful in doing the color correction of the scanned images as perfect scanning of colored images is much more difficult. Nikon LS-2000 or its newer model, the Super CoolScan 2000, with an optical density of 3.6 might be a good choice for photographers. However, Professional photographers must avoid the cheaper Nikon CoolScan III since it is a low-end product and has a low optical density of 3.0. In any case, Nikon 5000 is a world wide accepted model.
Can we use a flat bed scanner for scanning 35mm slide or negatives?
The flat bed scanners are typically made for scanning documents, which are kept on the glass surface of the scanners. On the other hand a real 35mm slide and negative scanner like Nikon Super CoolScan directly scan the negatives without any glass surfaces. Therefore the quality of images scanned from slide scanners is much better than that from flatbed scanners. Moreover, most of the flat bed scanners do not have a user-controlled focusing system. So these scanners would be fine if low quality scans are acceptable. For better quality scans a specific slide scanner is recommended.
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