How to choose a photo scanner

Nothing refreshes memories like a photo. Just one glance at the captured moments of strong emotional outbursts helps to restore in memory the entire gamut of feelings experienced at that moment. But unfortunately, digital cameras and cloud storage have become available only recently. This means that most cherished images age and fade in family photo albums, as paper and film tend to fade and become damaged. And the only available way to immortalize them is digitization.

How to choose a scanner for photos

Important! Ancient serpias, timeless black and white photographs, color frames that amaze with the depth of colors - each version of the images requires a careful approach to creating a digital duplicate.

Only professional equipment can work equally well with all types of photos. Its cost makes the purchase of such powerful scanners impractical for digitizing a couple of dozen frames - with such a number of images it is better to contact specialized specialists. When we are talking about hundreds of moments captured in the lens, it is not superfluous to know the basics of digitization.

What is special about photo scanning?

Important! Before you start choosing such expensive equipment, you should decide on the purpose of scanning.

Most often, photos are digitized for:

• restoration of old photographs;
• their universal storage;
• increasing size;
• copying;
• posting on the Internet;
• forwarding.

The first three tasks require equipment with high resolution and maximum color depth. The second one rather needs to focus on the speed of the procedure. But to digitize film, most likely, you will need a scanner that can cope with all of the above tasks.

Important! Working with film has its own specifics, since quite often it involves the need to eliminate minor damage characteristic of such a fragile storage medium.

By what criteria to choose

The first point is the type of scanner. Tablet options are the most versatile, so it’s best to choose this model for your home. Since the photo format rarely exceeds the size of a standard A4 sheet, you don’t need to focus on this point. But the autofeed option can make it easier to process film or a large number of one-size images.

Important! Please pay attention to supported operating systems. There are three of them: Windows, MacOS and Linux. Which computer the computer works on should be indicated in the scanner passport.

As for the resolution, it can always be adjusted in the right direction if you purchased equipment with a reserve. For home use, the recommended values ​​range from 600 to 1200 dpi, but for photo editors it is better to purchase equipment with a value of 2 thousand dpi.

If we are talking about color depth, then 24 bits will be enough for a household scanner, but specialists will need 48 bits. The type of sensor also plays a significant role:

• CCD guarantees sharpness, color accuracy and overall quality of digital copies, but is quite expensive and requires careful handling;
• CIS is cheaper, less energy-intensive and faster, but low depth of field often leads to loss of quality;
• LiDE is the arithmetic average of the previous two types.

When working with photographs, you often have to make a compromise between the quality and size of the digital copy. Therefore, you should know that the supported TIFF format is indispensable when digitizing photographs with a large number of shades, and the more common JPG is aimed at obtaining photos of moderate sizes.

Listed above are the main important characteristics of photo scanners. They are often combined with a number of additional options, such as the ability to directly send copies to network storage or auto-process them to eliminate defects. Each of these improvements requires a skeptical approach to the question of its necessity, since they significantly affect the final cost of the equipment, but are often redundant.