In 2013/2014 I wrote these 3 blog posts about my film scanning project during a 6 month period:
Scanning Torture (or Learning to Love Your Digital Camera) -- Part 1
https://bakubo.blogspot.com/2013/12/scanning-torture-or-learning-to-love.html
Over 10,000 35mm slides and negatives scanned! -- Part 2
https://bakubo.blogspot.com/2014/01/over-10000-35mm-slides-and-negatives.html
Update on scanning color negatives -- Part 3
https://bakubo.blogspot.com/2019/12/update-on-scanning-color-negatives.html
A month or so after I packed up my film scanner and all the old film in many boxes in January 2014 I found yet another medium size cardboard box full of film (negatives and slides) that I had not gone through so it turns out I was not done with the film scanning after all. 😞 I wrote a note on top of the box to remind me that I had not scanned the contents yet. I hoped to get around to it later. Well, recently I finally got around to it.
Last week I got that box, my 2000 Minolta film scanner, 2002 Windows XP HP laptop (Athlon CPU, 512mb RAM, 40gb HD, USB 1.1 ports) that has a SCSI connector that works with the scanner, 1990 Tokyo lightbox, and 1990 10x Tokyo loupe and for the last few days have been going through the contents and scanning. Not scanning everything, of course, but still I have to look at each negative on the lightbox and decide what to scan.
It took about 6 days of rather concentrated effort, but I looked at every single negative on the lightbox and scanned 973 of them. That was just a fraction of the total because I passed over most of them and didn't scan them. That 973 is on top of the over 10,000 I scanned years ago though. I thought I was done in 2013, but I wasn't. Now I think I really am done.
As it turns out, in this box there were no slides, just negatives. Slides are easier and much less tedious to scan. And except for one roll of Kodak Tri-X B&W negatives the rest were all color negatives. From my earlier blog posts (see above for links) you know how much I hate scanning color negatives and this box was full of them.
The old 2002 laptop had not been turned on for almost 11 years, but it still works. The Ctrl key stopped working around 2004 so that is a pain in the butt sometimes. And when typing it occasionally drops a character so you have to go back and type it again. I only use it for scanning though so it hobbles along.
The 2000 film scanner still seems fine too, but it uses a SCSI interface so it is difficult (close to impossible or maybe impossible) to connect to more modern laptops. That is why I have kept this old laptop around because I can plug the Adaptec SlimSCSI 1460D adapter card I bought long ago into the PC's PCMCIA slot and still use the scanner.
I have to copy the 50-65mb lossless compressed 64-bit raw scan files to a USB thumb drive and then use that to transfer them to my Macbook. I have to do that often because the laptop just has a 40gb HD and fills up quickly with these huge scan files. The thumb drive is USB 3.1, but the old laptop is just very slow USB 1.1. Fortunately, back in 2003 I bought a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card so I can use it and that makes the transfer of several gigabytes to the thumb drive somewhat more tolerable. I must unplug the SCSI card though since there is only one PCMCIA slot.
It is all tedious and annoying and I am so glad to be done with this for life...I hope. 😀
At this point you can all sit back, relax, smile and have a sip of beer, wine, whiskey, or tea and say to yourself: "Darn, it sure is nice not being you." 😂
