Bit of a boring question for you all... But any help would be much appreciated

Anyone know if there is a way to take 35mm film into a digital format without taking photos of my photos with a digicam?

Ta

It would take some time, but you could scan them all. Are they prints or negs/slides? Print scanners are cheap and work pretty quickly. Neg scanners are a lot more expensive and each scan takes much longer.

For Christmas last year, my wife sat for many days and scanned in all of the old prints her parents had collected over the years. I put it together into an hour-long digital slideshow with music that would play in a DVD player. It came out pretty nice, but it was a lot of work.

There may be services around that will do the scanning for you, though. Kodak used to have its Picture CD format, where you could get a CD of scans back when you sent in your film for processing, and you could also send in existing film, if I'm not mistaken.

You'd have to ask around at your local photo shops to see if they offer this sort of service, Picture CD or otherwise. I know a lot of the more modern places around here use a highspeed scanning system and make prints digitally when they process film. Many give you a CD back with your pictures. I'm guessing that at least some of these places would be willing to take in older negatives as well.

Cool... I have negatives and the pictures too... I'll mebbe go in and see about it tommorow at work

Ta

That's the way to go... It will take a lot of time though. Hopefully you have a fairly speedy scanner to use...

Yeah, print scanners are much faster, if you're planning to do it yourself.

You can get a reasonable quality flatbed print scanner now for a hundred bucks. Decent neg scanners still have the word 'thousand' in their price.

Ask your photoplace if they can print negatives to a cd.

CanoScan 8400F $150
Batch scan 12 slides at a time
image quality ok for quick digitizing but not that great for quality archiving.

Nikon COOLSCAN V ED $600
Superior quality to flatbed scanners...no comparison as far as quality.
"...can scan an image in only 38 seconds (including image transfer and display)."

MAX

Try to find one of those scanners that you can put a bunch of photos in a little slot and it runs through them. I forget what company makes one, but it looked really cool in the store.

Ya, Tally hit it right on the head, walgreens down here in Texas does that for next to nothing Pablito, if you have somethiNG like that your way ya might wanna pop in and ask em.

RS