The 2 most important things I forgot to ask was how much do you want to spend and what are you going to do with your digiatl files? i.e 5 mtr posters or web page albums.
I ended up getting a selection (random) done commercially to see the quality. While the quality was mostly very good and more than adequate for my purposes - which is primarily preservation - a number were simply not worth scanning. They were either out of focus, people with eyes shut, or worse, half-closed, etc. The actual process of selecting which negatives are worth scanning seems to be a critical part of the process. Our negatives aren't curated so each and every one needs to be examined. I don't have that level of equipment and holding a negative up to the light doesn't show much at all - not to my eyes anyway. So, I will end up buying one at some stage, scan as many as I can, and try to be ruthless in culling the ones that aren't worth keeping.
kiwipawl: The 2 most important things I forgot to ask was how much do you want to spend and what are you going to do with your digiatl files? i.e 5 mtr posters or web page albums.
There's a rule of thumb you should try to scan at double the dpi resolution of your final output, to have a bit of overhead for doing rotations/transforms/cropping etc. Based on that, to get 1920x1080 final images from 35mm film the scan resolution needs to be at about 3000 dpi (which is easy enough), and for 4K it's about 6000 dpi (which is getting a bit more demanding).
In my experience scans from old slides need heaps of colour correction, and also dust removal (for which Photoshop has a great filter).
It is better to get a scanner that has IR dust and scratch removal, they are really good and will save you hours of retouching in photoshop. The IR scratch and dust remover only works with surface defects and will not work with mold in the slides at is is normally in the emulsion. This is a major problem with slides but something I never seen it with negs.
If you have a good digital camera with macro, a easy option to view your neg/slides or to get lower res files to check or to create thumbnails with is to put your camera on a stand over a light box and to capture the images with your camera like this.
8 Months on and I finally bought a CanoScan 9000F as recommended by joker97. Early days yet but I am delighted with the results so far. The software setup was a pretty quirky in my view (Mac) and using the actual software feels the same. Definitely feels ported from Windows. As many noted above, the time involved in the actual scanning process will be a factor, but I am OK with that given the results so far. Should've bought one years ago :-)
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