As the name indicates, a film scanner is designed to scan film used in 35mm slides and other formats.
A 35mm slide frame size is 2" x 2" or 50mm x 50mm. The films image area is about 1.43" inches wide. The aspect-ratio is 3 parts wide and 2 parts high. The scanner needs to be quite powerful to scale an image large enough for a decent print size. The film-scanner we use scans at 4000 dpi (dots per inch or ppi-pixels per inch). This can be done since we are scanning film, which has a lot more detail than a paper print.
What we achieve is an image that will print at good quality at 300 dpi printer resolution in sizes ranging from 4" x 6" to 11" x 17" approximately. Another feature we use on color film is "image correction enhancement" (ICE). Slides have dust from their frames or storage containers and smudges from handling. ICE allows the scanned image to have scratches, dust and finger prints removed or greatly improved in the final image.
Why are Film-Scanners better?
We scan all images so that they will print at 300 dpi (dots per inch) printer resolution. This is usually where printers print their best quality images. When the image is scanned it carries the size of the image and the selected printer dpi as a tag that most image editors will recognize when you get ready to print.
Note: You can change the dpi setting before printing and get various results. For example, if we use an image that was originally scanned at 4000 dpi for 300 dpi printer setting (print size result = 11" x 17"):
Before printing, select 150 dpi printer setting and you will get a print sized at approximately 23" x 34". This will probably make your image grainy or reveal the image pixels.
You can go the other way and use the same example at 600 dpi and you will get a print sized at approximately 6" x 8.5".
You haven't changed the original image size, you are only asking the printer to print bigger pixels or smaller pixels. Larger will usually result in less desirable results.
This is an important step and determines image size and possible print quality.
This is an option that does take some thought. The images supplied on CD-R or DVD-R can be used for printing or other projects. The DVD Slideshow is to be viewed from a Television DVD player or a Windows or Mac operating platform computer.
For best results we can place approximaetly 720 images on each DVD or up to 1440 images with more compression which means not quite the quality as when we used fewer images per DVD.
We usually use a Title Menu (opening page) which leads to a Navigation Page to your images. These can be displayed per year or event and will be determined by you. We need a map (list) that tells us how to label and display your images.
You have already sorted your slides into groups for the initial scanning project and this is a good base to tell us how those groups need to be displayed.
Ask us about preparing for the DVD Slideshow and we will try to make this simple.
What needs to be done?
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) or sometimes displayed as JPG, is a lossy format. This means when a file is saved as a JPEG file in a photo editor, it will be compressed to make the file size smaller. How much smaller depends on how much compression is selected during the save image process. This format is one of the most popular since the compression isn't very noticeable in small doses, and all browsers and image editors recognize this format. The down side is that each time the file is modified and re-saved, the compression occurs again. This reduces the file size and the quality again. Web use of this format is popular since the file size reduction will speed up page-loading-time.
TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) or sometimes displayed as TIF, is a lossless format. This means when a file is saved as a TIFF file in a photo eidtor, it will NOT be compressed; thus, keeping all of the photos information intact. The down side is that these files can be huge. If you will need to modify and reuse the image for several different things, then select the TIFF format since re-saving will not affect quality.
What makes them different?
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