AG Schnozz wrote:
>So, should I just get the Nikon V-ED and call it a day? Or
>should I risk it and get the Minolta 5400E?
>
>
The 5400E is obviously a good scanner. With your experience with
scanning a and VueScan expertise, I can't imagine you wouldn't get
exceptional scans with either it or the Nikon.
However, it's a business decision, isn't it? So I'll take off the
amateur hat of my last post and put on the analyst hat I used for so
many years in business.
After some time making your own prints for commercial jobs, you found
that it was better business to have the printing done by specialists. In
theory, you should investigate price and quality of outside scanning
services. Emotionally, though, I suspect that the risk of loss or damage
to your original film would make this a non-starter, even if price and
quality make business sense.
Depending on the potential income streams from the scanned images and
the alternative income producing uses of your time, a more expensive
initial capital outlay may be the cheaper overall solution.
In one important sense, I'm not sure either of the scanners you mention
is the best answer. The Nikon 5000 ED and slide feeder cost about
$1,500 new and can batch feed 50 slides at once unattended. If you have
something in the low thousands of slides you want to scan, it sounds
pretty likely that you would be way ahead to buy Nikon with slide
feeder, scan everything in unattended batches, and then sell the feeder.
By then, you would have a very good idea of what's involved in scanning
all the neg strips and how well the scanner meets your B&W needs. Then
you either keep it to do the rest of the scanning or find another
solution and sell it too.
Assuming 2,000 slides and a net loss on purchase and resale of scanner
and loader of $700, you have an out of pocket cost of 35 cents per
slide, right around the low end of commercial services. More slides,
lower per image cost. Of course, you will have time costs in setting up,
testing and getting the setup right to get good scans, amortizes over
lots of slides, but very little in actually doing the scans.
Either way, the combo should have more than paid for itself in time
saved for other productive work compared to putting slides in and
scanning them 4 at a time on the V-ED or 5400E. You could get some spare
slide holders to pre load, but it would still be very labor intensive in
comparison.
You could set up 50 slide stacks ahead of time and just drop by from
time to time to feed them in, or even have others in the family who are
home feed them to the scanner when you are out doing other things.
Another thing to remember is that ICE means never having to go through
and clean the slides before scanning or spot afterwards (well, ok, very,
very seldom). The whole slide part of the project could be fininshed and
out of the way very quickly.
Moose
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