I am buying a scanner for film soon primarly for B&W negs plus color slides and color negs it appears that the HP20 photosmart is a best buy for my finances. Need to produce CD's with thumbnail access to cross platform images. My dream is to produce copywrite free CD's so that anyone can use my 10 to 30 meg 36 or 24 bit photo quality uncompressed images for any use the user requires copywrite and royalty free. I have approxamately 6000 images from the 1960's mostly what I call streetshots which I expect will condense into 2 to 5 CD'with 60 to 70 images per CD for sale over the internet any ideas on the best cheap software for image files? Adobe Acrobat or web format appears best any comments? Max I will pay for CD file software is approx

-- Thomas Alcorn (athomas@coffey.com), December 11, 1999

Answers

The HP S20 gets some good write-ups, but the new USB only version is very slow apparently. If you have a backlog of 6000 negs this may be a big disadvantage. One of the world's best kept secrets seems to be ACER's ScanWit 2720 film scanner.

See: http://www.acerperipherals.com/ps_imaging/2720s_scanwit.htm

Cheaper than the HP, 2700dpi resolution, 36 bit, SCSI interface, supplied complete with PCI bus interface card, 40 second scan time (provided you've got a fast PC with bags of memory), versatile but fiddly twain software supplied with it. Price in the UK is #299 (about $500 US) I'm very pleased with mine, the only thing I can say against it is that stockists seem to be few and far between, and that awful name, "ScanWit!!".

I don't know of any common file format that supports 36 bit colour depth at present. Low compression-ratio 24 bit progressive JPEG is probably the best compromise for size, quality and portability.

Best of luck with the project.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), December 15, 1999.