Film Negative Scanning Service

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ICEDigital ICE stands for Digital Image Correction and Enhancement and is a technology developed by Kodak that removes surface defects, such as dust and scratches from negatives and slides during the scanning process. The corrections are made on the scanner and is achieved by scanning the image from two different lamps, one a normal RGB lamp and the other infrared . The IR lamp detects the dust or scratch and the image is modified based on the image picked up by the RGB lamp. If a negative is in good condition and has no dust or scratches, it is always preferable to scan without ICE to ensure you are left with an image as close to the original.

DPIDots per inch is the term used to measure the density of an image, namely the number of dots that can be placed in a line within 1 inch (2.54cm). The higher the DPI used to scan a slide, the larger the resulting file will be. Most negatives are 35mm square, approximately 1.4 inches, so therefore if we scan a negative film image at 100dpi, we will get an image approximately 140 pixels square. To give you an idea of scale, a modern digital camera taking a 10 megapixel image will create an image approximately 3600 pixels wide, so 35mm negatives should be scanned at a MUCH higher resolution. We can scan upto 4800 dpi, which will create an image size of approximately 6700 pixels wide. However, for most everyday usage, such as Facebook, email, standard size prints, 1200dpi should be fine, image sizes will be approximately 2000 pixels wide.

JPG JPEG files are the most commonly used method of storing images on computers and digital cameras. negatives's scanned to JPEG files do produce excellent results whilst taking up a minimum of space, and achieves this by compressing your images, which results in a loss of quality. However, the JPEG standard allows for different levels of compression, with higher quality scans resulting the less you compress the image. By default, Pixave scan your negatives in JPEG format with the least level of compression, resulting in high quality images that are reasonably large in size. The quality will be outstanding and will look fantastic for everyday use such as reprinting as a standard size photographs. There are some applications that require a higher quality, e.g. images to be printed in magazines, where professionals require the highest quality possible, in which case, we are happy to scan your negative in TIFF format which are lossless (i.e. have no compression) but take up HUGE amounts of disk space.

TIFTagged Image File Format (TIFF) files are commonly used to store images within the publishing industry, graphic artists and professional photographers. TIFF files produce a better quality image when compared to JPEG files, because the images are not compressed, however they take significantly more space on your hard drive, e.g. a 1200 DPI scan of a transparency that creates an image sized 5267 * 6899 pixels is 18.2MB in JPEG format but 105.2MB in TIFF format. As you can see from these figures, the JPEG format has removed 80MB of the same image, and therefore it is logical to assume that the TIFF file is of higher quality, however this is a very subjective area as a lot of people cannot tell the difference, and the cost of storing TIFF files compared to JPEG on your systems can be a lot higher simply due amount of disk space required.

Pixave are happy to scan your negatives in your choice of resolution file format (JPEG / TIFF) at no extra cost. By default your negatives will be scanned at 4800 DPI into JPEG format, if you have different requirements please let us know in the special instructions of our order page or when you speak to us on the phone.