I’m currently in the market for a new printer, the old HP is dying a slow painfully sounding death:(. I also have a bunch of 35mm negatives and photos that I’d like to be able to save to my computer. I’d like some advise on whether it would be best to buy a new “All in One” printer / scanner from HP or would it be best to have a separate printer and scanner?
Also, would it be better to scan the negatives or a 4"x6" print? The reason that I’m asking is because the one HP printer / scanner that I’m looking at (C6280) doesn’t come with an attachment to scan negatives and I don’t think one is available. Are there any programs available to scan negatives using Linux?
my suspicion would be that you would be better to buy two separate devices: an inkjet printer, if you want to print photos, and a scanner; many regions now have second-hand forums; and one can buy second-hand scanners very cheaply;
IMHO,
If you old HP was good to you, why not replace it with another HP All-in-One? I’ve got one(C3180) it works very well,& for HP finding drivers in Linux is very easy!
Besides if you can’t get an HP going thru yast then you can always go to the hplip(just google it) website.
I would advise against scanning prints and prefer scanning the negatives. Prints already lost a lot of info (briliance, etc) the negative still has (when stored andd handled correct).
Unless you are going for very high resolution, an HP All in one will be fine. Bear in mind that most people never use the highest resolutions anyway because the files become so large. So a specialist scanner will only be useful to you if you intend to scan and save photos in a very high resolution not available on an All in one.
However, it is not clear that you would get much benefit from a very high resolution scanner because photos derived from negatives are lower resolution than slides which would need a specialist scanner.
I think to scan negatives, it’s best to have a scanner specifically designed for that purpose. I have used several attachments for scanning negatives on regular scanners (HP, Umax, Mustek) and from my experience, not only is it a pain and very time consuming, but the results are fairly dissapointing.
Since the negatives are small, you have to scan them at very high resolution. And most scanners use software to scan resolutions higher than say 1200 DPI. And so it takes twice or three times as long for the image to be scanned.
Also, any dust on the negative is greatly magnified due to the higher resolution.
If you have the attachements for scanning negatives, by all means, try it out yourself. I think Kooka allows you to scan transparencies if you scanner is supported and has this feature. BTW, I really like using Kooka for scanning in Linux. It works really well, better than most Windows scanning programs.
But I myself really dread scanning negatives mostly because of all the time it takes. And for me, I don’t see any real advantage to scanning the negative if I already have a print, because faded pictures are really easy to fix in GIMP or Photoshop anyway.
Thanks for all the input. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do. It doesn’t bother me that it would take some time to scan my 35mm negatives. Once these are all scanned I would never have to do it again seeing that I now use a digital camera.
Maybe I’ll see if I can get a decent used scanner (cheap) on Ebay that can scan negatives. Hopefully one that will work with Linux.
I see piles of the All In One units at the thrift stores too. For some reason, a lot of people decide to get rid of them. I’ve even saw one sitting on the sidewalk in front of a thrift store with a “free” sign on it.
Hopefully you got some kind of transparency adapter for your all-in-one unit, though like I said, negatives are quite a pain to scan.
I am really impressed with the quality of the scanning software available for Linux. The next time I do any scanning, it’s not gonna be in Windows, that’s for sure. Try the scanning program Kooka if you get a chance, it should be on your install disc.