An online ad for a small Kodak-branded film and slide scanner caught my eye yesterday, and I clicked through for information about the product.
It was pretty straightforward until I got to the fine print and saw this disclaimer.
My first reaction was one of disbelief. Are there really enough people stupid enough to try to scan undeveloped film to warrant this warning?
But, on reflection, I’m just showing my age. I guess we’re far enough into the digital age that most people have had no experience with film. They’ve never had to drop a roll of film off for commercial processing and then wait days for the prints to be returned, or used a lightproof bag to load film into a developing canister, measured out the necessarily chemicals, tested the temperature, and calculated the proper developments times, then left the film hanging to dry before going into a darkroom to make prints from the resulting negatives.
So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that they don’t know the first thing about how to handle film.
Any thoughts?
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That’s pretty funny, actually. Most of my career in photojournalism required working in a totally dark room, loading black-and-white film onto stainless steel reels so that whatever was shot could be developed with D-76.
Instead of a slide scanner, I was thinking of investing in a good Canon DSLR. The dynamic range of modern imagers, and their resolution, should provide an excellent digital capture of color slides.
Would require building a setup to align the slide, macro lens and light source. But it would be a better use of limited funds. A slide scanner is useful for only one purpose. A DSLR can be used to shoot photos and video, too.
Then again, plenty of people are just f’n stupid.
I never worked in the journalism field. But I remember people having personal dark rooms as a hobby. I always thought that was pretty cool but I didn’t have the funds to buy the stuff at the time. My favorite class was black and white photography.
Photography has kind of passed me by now. I am the last one you want to pass your phone to for the family picture. I will fuss with the screen and not know what to push.
One of my recent customers came in looking for a spring for the re-wind knob from his Nikon. He had evidently just got the camera as a gift from his grandmother and shot a roll of film and upon re-winding the film into the cassette he neglected to press the film release button and somehow wound the knob the wrong way until it got unscrewed and fell out. He’s learning about the analog cameras about as fast as I am learning to ‘snip’ and ‘glue’ on the computer !!! I would like to know if the slide scanner is a practical device. I have many, many carousels filled with slides long time not seen.