Scanning Old Photos

[meierlde]

Epson has a formula that suggests that you take the ratio of the lengths of the input document and the largest desired output document and divide them, and multiply by 300 to get the desired resolution. Thus to take a 4x6 to 8x10 go for 600 dpi. For 35mm slides to go to say an 8x10 it would be 2400 dpi, and to go to 16x20 5100 dpi.

 

[ERD50]

Memory is cheap. There is no reason to compress photos to save space.

For 500 or so photos (or even many more), I'd agree.

But just as a point of reference, a while back I finally got through a project of transferring ~ 30 hours of Mini-DV video tapes to a computer. I could do a massive amount of compression on those (10~30x IIRC) and I couldn't see any degradation (just family videos, content more important than quality).

Yes, memory is cheap, but these files were so massive, I'd need to dedicate an entire drive to them, and making a backup would take all day, versus a few hours.

Smaller file sizes can be about convenience as well, especially when quality just isn't that big a deal.

For my music files, only lossless FLAC format. I sometimes make a compressed copy for a portable player or casual use.

-ERD50