I've been going through some albums and photos recently, and found a box with a bunch of films. After a more careful look, I saw these were our old family photos - developed films from the last 20 years as well as slides that were 30 years old and more. A few of those were printed, and maybe we had them in an album somewhere, but mostly they are no longer available for us, and the means to reproduce them are disappearing with the years.
So I decided to bring them back from the confines of this box and digitize them. My options were limited however - there are several photo labs that can still scan films and slides, but the problem is cost and image resolution. The basic scan produces images of about 1.5 megapixels which is rather useless, and for a reasonable resolution of about 2000x3000 (6 megapixels) the cost to scan all we had (some 35 films and 70 single slides) would be in the thousands of shekels.
After looking for other options, I found that although it will take some more time and effort on my part, it's better to purchase a dedicated film/slide scanner by myself and sell it second hand later when I'm done. This will be both cheaper and allow me to scan those family photos at the best possible quality. After some research, my current choice is this model - Plustek 7600i SE, which has good resolution and a mechanism for detecting and removing dust and scratches from the scan based on an additional infra-red scan of the film.
Hopefully I'll be done in a month or so, and we'll be able to look easily at our old family photos again.
