I've been scanning old prints lately. Black and white, color, I make them as they present themselves to me. I've got an inexpensive Canon CanoScan LiDE 25 that does the job most of the time as you saw in some of my previous posts. But one album of prints is giving me a hard time. There must be something special about it's glossy surface to make it so.
This is a detail of one of the prints showing me what the problem is:
BTW, this is a snapshot of my grandparents taking breakfast in 1954. But notice the vertical lines, visible especially along the standing woman's shoulder and hair. I did'nt get that on most of the other print types.
Now, I needed a new printer so it so happened the the most inexpensive one I could get was a HP combo scanner-printer, model Photosmart C4450. I had not even installed it when I saw my problems with scanning the above print, so that prompted me to get to it's installation to se if this HP would fair better with these prints than the Canon.
This is a detail of what I got:
No vertical lines but a blurry image. No details show up. Also, in the dark areas we see a mottled texture. Totally unacceptable.
An alternative to the scanner is the digital camera. With the macro setting, one can get around to creating pretty good images of printed matter. And it works much faster than a scanner. There are down sides, such as perfect alignment of the picture frame with what's being shot. You get a arc and not a straight line if you do'nt zoom in first. Anyway, I took my Canon Powershot A650IS, set it to macro and took a pic of the problem prints.
For comparison, this is a detail of what I got:
Much much better! No vertical lines, no mottled areas, and just as good as I could see with the naked eye, or better! We can see for example the Kellog's Corn Flakes cereal box's in much more detail (remember milk in glass bottles waiting at the door?). But another down side to this is all the refletion from ambient lights coming off the print, specially if it's a glossy print. There are ways to go around that with the proper setup. But the ideal is a scanner that can do quality. I've checked on the web and these can go to the thousands of dollars for a museum quality scanner. Froget it, I'll make do with what ordinary retailers, web or street, have to offer! Or use my camera!
Addendum:
The above tests were done last week. All scans done in the Color setting. Just this morning, I tried again the Canon scanner but used the Grayscale setting. The image turnde out to be not too bad:
But one wishes to be able to scan b&w prints in color if one wishes to do so. All b&w prints have their own tints of gray and it's sometimes fun to show these variations. But, in the end, perhaps it's better to scan just in grayscale because the scanner will likely not show the colors as you see them with the naked eye, or we think they show them but who knows that may be because of how your computer screen is configured and that from one screen to another the tint of gray will certainly vary. When considering that last point, it's a useless endeavor to try to show whatever exact tint of gray your print has. Might as well go to grayscale and save on harddrive space (grayscale take a lot less space than color). An exception to that would be sepia prints. But who knows. It's all on a case by case, print by print, basis. Scan and see.
