Slide scanning

[peterqd]

I've had a disappointing saga trying to get slides processed and scanned recently.

On holiday at Buxton last month I shot some pictures with the ME Super using the standard Pentax-M smc 1.7/50 K-mount lens. It was a trial of the meter and shutter, as it had had a fault which was recently repaired. I also wanted to find out about E6 slide processing locally, as I've only used send-away Kodachrome till now. So I used cheap Fuji Velvia 200.

I took the exposed film in to a local Happy-Snaps lab around the middle of June as they told me they do the processing and slide mounting in the shop and it would take 2 days. Cost was over Ł16.00 for 36 slides. I waited over 2 weeks for them to ring and finally they admitted they'd sent the film away for processing and the lab had rung them to say their machine had broken down and the slides would yet take another 2 weeks! I asked them to return the film, which finally arrived back on 13 July.

I then took the film into the local Jessops. They wouldn't do the processing in the shop but said it would take about a week, cost Ł8.99, which I accepted. They finally arrived back yesterday but I was really disappointed with the scans.

Here's two examples, the top pictures are my own scans of the slides, using my old Agfa Snapscan e50 flatbed scanner, unaltered apart from resizing. The lower pictures are the Jessop scans, again resized.




and



They've altered the colours and the contrast a lot, and you can't tell from these, but the pictures are very low definition. I was expecting around 3Mb files, but they're only around 650Kb. What do you think?

edit: larger pictures posted

[Riku]

Can't tell much about so small pictures but I guess you must do everything yourself to get results you want.

[peterqd]

[LucisPictor]

AFAIK, these minilabs use some kind of auto-correction.

My local dealer scans the photo to files of about 1.5 MB.
That's good enough for my needs. (If I need a large print, I still have the negative/slide.)

[Riku]