Foreword

Capturing analog pictures, can be a slow and painstaking process if you want to do it right. Therefore, depending on your need, I will list the three personas in recommendations and procedures where it is meaningful to do so. If you do not know what I'm talking about yet, there is a brief page outlining personas here.

Unlike capturing some other analog media, photography capturing equipment is still reasonably available. I say reasonably because we are now getting into a situation where some of the (still sold) equipment such as high end Epson Scanners are seemingly not being further developed, the software is getting older and I'm not sure if we will start to see the market pull away from quality scanners at the high end due to market change. There will I think be a continuing need for some middle of the range gear for some time but if this suits an archivists need to bulk import e.g. a large number of 120mm negatives from your grandfathers photo stash (like I did), I could not say.

Storage

While not as demanding as video tends to be, you can use a surprisingly large amount of disk space if your focus is to archiving photos in high quality. Some may argue this is cheap however other things come into it too. If you archive at high resolutions and are scanning negatives for example, this can be very slow at high quality, which then needs more expensive scanners. Furthermore, you may find that you need to then create a second copy of lower quality images for sharing and figure out how to distribute the images to others in the family. And storage isn't just about today, it's about tomorrow. The longevity of storage media such as USB sticks is limited and requires you to re-copy it after some years in order to stop it from degrading. I cover long term storage options elsewhere on this site.

Methodology Overview

As I've said in my other posts there is always more than one way to do a task and capturing analog photography is no exception. And on top of that there is more than one type of analog image format to scan and not all scanners do all formats. For example, it is relatively niche to get a scanner that scans negatives. Also, if you just have a few paper photos you can get away with a relatively cheap scanner such as one that comes with your printer. If you have a lot of photos, you get to choose between how many years you are prepared to be scanning on weekends for, how much you're going to pay someone else to do it or how much you're willing to meet in the middle, e.g. buy your own device and save yourself some time. The methodology we use (which we will go over later) will depend somewhat upon what kind of format you need to ingest, how much of it you have and how much you care about the resulting output.

Differences in Equipment

Scanners

There can be a large difference in the quality and capability of scanner hardware. On the cheaper end of the spectrum, the all in one scanner / printer / fax devices seem to do a good job. However, they tend to have lower scan resolution, cheaper sensor types and limited colour depth. On the other hand a dedicated scanner (even on the cheaper end) tend to have at least double the scan resolution, have much better sensors, handle depth of field better (good for books) have higher colour depth and include extra features such as dust and scratch removal and film scanning capability.

Here's a quick table to help visualise that better:

Summary Equipment Needed

Paper Photo Equipment

Paper photos have the most widely available or easiest to obtain hardware of all the analog formats to capture. This is because there is no ageing mechanical playback device needed to play them back before you capture them. Have a look at the buying guide (TBC) after reading this for some suggestions on what to purchase.

• For the Impatient - Use either an All in one existing printer / scanner on top of your printer, or take them to a photo house which you can pay to scan them. If you're up for spending a bit of money and have quite a few photos, have a look at a Dedicated High Speed Paper Scanner such as the Epson FastFoto FF-680W, I did several thousand of mine using one of these in a single day.
• For the Libran - A mix. I'd get a dedicated scanner such as the v850 pro for special photographs that you want to have at high quality and a high speed scanner as well if you have thousands of others. If you notice something special, you can always scan that one again later. Bonus is the v850 pro can be used for your negative scanning as well
• For the perfectionist - A high end dedicated scanner that has the most colour depth and best sensor. Plus the high speed scanner too because even if you want perfection, I doubt you can spend the time required to scan that many photographs manually. Another option is to find a photo house to pay to do it, but the ones I've seen so far use the same high speed scanner mentioned here.

Negative and Slide Equipment

• For the Impatient - Take them to a dedicated photo scanning shop. There are basically no 'fast' options you can do at home, unless you only have a small number of negatives, in which case it's not worth buying a negative scanner anyway.
• For the Libran - Get a high end consumer scanner such as the Epson v850 Pro NZD$1900, there are not really any quality equivalents in this price range (or if you find one, let me know)!
• For the perfectionist - Plustek OpticFilm 120. This is a dedicated film scanner that can't do any paper scans (unlike the Epson v850 pro), however it's 2-3x the price at NZ$2500-3000. If money is no object a Hasselblad Flextight X1/X5 virtual drum scanner. Super high dynamic range but depending on the model NZD$15,000-25,000.

There are other options which may suit you better highlighted in the buying guide later in the series, the options above are chosen because they're still readily available new.

Next: Capturing Analog Photography into Digital Formats - Part II - Capture Differences