scaner for stills that auto crops & rotates w/ adf

cheroxy wrote on 5/3/2007, 11:19 AM

Does anything like this exist? I would like to find the easiest way to scan multiple stills:

-at high resolution
-full color depth
-different sizes
-not have to take time to crop
-not have to take time to rotate

Is there a way? If not, what is the best current work around?
Thanks,
Carson

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 5/3/2007, 11:28 AM

It shouldn't be too difficult to find one that does everything you want except for rotating and perhaps feeding different size images. It would take a pretty sophisticated piece of scanner software to know whether your image is sideways or upside-down and rotate it to the correct orientation.

cheroxy wrote on 5/3/2007, 12:56 PM

Thanks John.

To clarify, I don't need it to be put top up, but would like it to crop it down to the four edges and rotate it to be level. I hate scanning in on my flat bed and having to do all that manually.

johnmeyer wrote on 5/3/2007, 1:09 PM

I have scanned over 70,000 slides, negatives, and prints. These are your options, in descending order of quality:

1. Slide scanner. Expect 1-2 minutes per scan. Use Vuescan software rather than OEM software so that the process is automated. By definition, the media is scanned without skew (unless you really mess up).

2. Scan using a flatbed with a transparency adapter. You can scan a little faster. My flatbed has a carrier that holds negatives or slides and assures that they are square, so you don't have to do any re-alignment. If you are scanning prints, they sometimes tend to "squirm" as you put down the lid to hold them in place. You can use Vuescan for this process as well, and you can set the parameters to that it will take all the prints or negatives and "cut" them into individual JPG, (or TIF or BMP) files. However, they need to be the same size.

3. For slides, you can project them and then use a digital camera to capture the image. I had a friend who wanted to scan 10,000 slides and didn't have the time to do it using the two methods outline above. He got all 10,000 done in less than two days. The only thing that took time was getting all the slides oriented in the same direction so he didn't have to tilt the camera back and forth. The alternative would be to devise a camera mount that would let you toggle quickly between portrait and landscape.

JJKizak wrote on 5/3/2007, 4:38 PM

Geez, I hope he took a rest at the 5000 point. He probably should have taken a video of that and called it "Repitition" and submitted it to a film festival.
JJK

johnmeyer wrote on 5/4/2007, 12:30 AM

Geez, I hope he took a rest at the 5000 point. He probably should have taken a video of that and called it "Repetition" and submitted it to a film festival.

He is the most amazing person I've ever met. He has copied his favorite book, in longhand over a dozen times, and given it to his friends as a gift. He has run over 100 marathons, including half a dozen ultra marathons; he is an aerobatic pilot; he races sailboats; and he is one of founding people in the computer revolution, having written much of the code in the original PC operating systems (no not MS-DOS -- one step before that). He turns 60 in a month and is still writing more computer code in a week than most people do in a year.