Chapter 6: Web Pages and Scanning

The magic that isn't.


In a courageous attempt to put some of my terrible pics on the web, I bought an HP 6200 scanner in mid 1998 because of the fairly high resolution and a "slide attachment", which turned out to be a plastic pyramid with a mirror in it. This was a moderately expensive white elephant as it took forever to clean up the terrible quality scans of dust and so on. I still have this and use it for flatbed stuff, but probably should sell it and buy a $50 one.

In late '98 I bought a cheap/refurbished/second hand 'proper' slide scanner from a dodgy auction website. Image quality was OK, although dark (night shots) were awful. After a couple of years, the image quality was getting worse, with visible banding on the scans.

In June 2001 I got a flash CanoScan 4000 slide scanner after getting fed up. It's good. Really good. I'd rather pump negatives through this baby than scan prints on the crappy HP. I usually scan in the good pics at 4000 dpi with the FARE/ICE dust setting 'on' which virtually eliminates the need to clean up dust and small scratches on slides. I save these in TIFF format and then Photoshop them, eventually ending up with a 800 pixels wide (or 600 tall) Jpegs. 

Once the images are done, ThumbsPlus is used to generate the thumbnail images and build a skeleton webpage which is then tweaked using MS FrontPage which synchs things up with the website.

I'm working my way slowly through the slide collection rescanning them but there are still plenty of crappy scans to be found on this website, so you can try to guess which ones were produced by which scanner.

Of course moving to digital means that processing this stuff is much faster - firstly because you don't have to do the scanning thing, but also you don't have to wait for your films to be developed, so can start editing as soon as you download the pics from the card over lunch at Subway.