Subtitles of the Movie

All scanners work in about the same basic way, that is they shine light either on or, in the case of slides and negatives, through a film or negative image and then project that image on to a CCD, which is a charged couple device, and then send it to the AD converter where they are saved as digital files and then passed on to the hard drive, where it is picked up by Photoshop and manipulated by you. Now let's start with flat-bed scanners; I am sure this is something everyone has seen. They can range in price from thirty dollars all the way up to fifty-eight hundred dollars. Now the one thing they all have in common is that they do a great job at scanning printed images and graphics but dollar for dollar, they do a horrible job in scanning slides and negatives. Do not waste your money on a flat-bed scanner if you have to do slide or negative scanning. You will not be happy with the results, but when scanning those old photos from grandma's photo box, they do an admirable job. Slide scanners are the next step up in quality and when possible, you always want to scan from either the negative or the slide. Prints, as we had discussed before, have a dynamic range of about two point five percent or rather just two point five. Slides and negatives are capable of a dynamic range of three point two to three point seven. This means that we have much more photo detail from a slide or a negative than from print. Slide and negative scanners are substantially more expensive than flat-bed scanners but they are starting in price now at about a hundred and eighty dollars. However, if you buy a slide scanner for a hundred and eighty dollars you are wasting your money. You will get a marginally better scan from it than you will from a comparably priced flat-bed scanner, but it will be full of noise and have a dynamic range of not more than two point eight to three. You can go out and check for yourself and I will bet when you investigate, those one hundred and eighty dollar slide scanners you will not see a DMAX quote because it is embarrassingly low. Now one of the best slide scanners in the market is the Nikon Coolscan 8000 or if you can live without the capability of scanning large and medium format scans, then the 4000 will be just as good. The Nikon 8000 has a street price of about twenty-two hundred dollars, with the 4000 costing about eleven hundred. But this will be the best money spent on a scanner; the noise level is incredibly low for a CCD scanner and the DMAX rating on this scanner is quoted at four point two. The four point two DMAX rating I think is an obvious overstatement but you can be sure of three point eight to four, which of course will serve you very well. Now the last category of scanners is called a drum scanner due to the fact that the image or slide is removed from its mount and then covered with a thin layer of oil to cover up the scratches and remove the dust particles. The slide is then mounted on a drum, which contains the sensor device, it is slightly bent and then it is rotated across a very tiny beam of light that scans the image, pixel by pixel, thus creating a better scan. The sensor device in these scanners is referred to as a photo multiplier tube; it operates at a much cooler temperature than slide or flat-bed scanners and thus has virtually no noise and is more sensitive to a broader range of color tones and shades than CCD sensors used in flat-bed and slide scanners. Now decent drum scanners cost in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars which is why you don't own one or or me either for that matter. Drum scans are available from service bureaus and cost anywhere from eighty to two hundred and fifty dollars, depending on the size of your negative and the resolution you desire. Some drum scanners are capable of generating a true optical thirteen thousand DPI scan which can result in a file size in the six hundred and fifty meg range and unless you've got a dual CPU server-type mondo computer, Photoshop will probably spit out that size file. And of course it is doubtful that you will be dealing with anything that huge in size, but you will be dealing quite frequently with scans in the fifty meg range. Now to sum it up in the world of scanner quality, you get what you pay for as we had mentioned before. For that reason you will always want to buy the most that you can afford.