markr1963

We're looking at digitising all our old negs and slides for use in marketing etc. There's potentially hundreds if not thousands of images that need storing. They are to be scanned at 2400dpi, apparently, to allow at least full A4 page high quality enlargement.

What's the best way to store these? A server with a huge drive (or 2 if mirrored), a NAS device, a PC with huge, cheap, IDE or...?
We'd also need to back these images up. Our current backup drive deals with our day to day stuff and is DDS4. Any recommendations/suggestions?

TIA
Mark

lightning101

That equates to the following for A4


28063 x 19843 pixels at about 10mb for a white screen no data per image.

This might help your decision. You would be better off with a NAS or SAN networked to you scanner PC for Terrabyte storage.

IWatkins

As for getting the images scanned, unless you already have automated scanning equipment, you may be much better off (financially and time wise) to farm the whole lot out to be scanned professionally.

You may well get them scanned at 2400dpi but very unlikely you would want to store them at that sort of size. 300dpi is much more likely.

A4 at 300 dpi (i.e. good enough for most printing) equates to an image of 2480 x 3508 pixels. Saved as a 8-bit (per channel) TIFF (no compression) you are looking at ~25Mb for an image.

So working on that, for A4 sized images at 300dpi you will need 25 x 1000 = 25Gb (very approx.) per thousand images. If you do need the full 16-bit per channel scans (i.e. if they are going to be edited a lot etc.) then work on a 50Mb per file, so 50 x 1000 = 50Gb per 1000 images.

So, you can see that a single large IDE disk will do the job. But obviously, for security/speed you might want to go with a RAID array either with IDE/SATA/SCSI.

Even so, a simply disk system is all you need, plus a method to back it up.

Of course, if you need to store at a higher bit density, 600dpi for example, 600dpi doesn't affect file size by multiplying by 2 it is by 4.

Cheers

Ian

markr1963

Thanks guys

Ian:
Can you recommend anyone who we could use?

Mark

IWatkins

Mark,

Sorry, don't have a personal recommendation for you as I've never done it myself. But there are plenty of outfits out there, do a Google (UK) for "slide negative scanning bureau" will give you plenty of hits.

Our guys at work have done it, but because we are MoD they just farmed it out to another part of MoD.

Cheers

Ian

DJ Dunk

iTrader: (5)

markr1963 - Drop me a mail mate (jduncan@ironmountain.co.uk) with details of how many you want done and I'll see what we can do

markr1963

DJ Dunk:
YHM

Mark

markr1963

DJ Dunk:
YHM again

Paranoia appears to have set in up at the top so it looks like we're going to do the scanning in-house So can someone recommend a suitable neg/pos scanner around the £500 mark?

Any thoughts on these?
Minolta Dimage Scan Elite 5400
Canon CanoScan FS4000US

TIA
Mark

DJ Dunk

iTrader: (5)

Mark - YHM

If you have a chat with Charles, he'll be able to give a professional opinion on the kit you mention.