Would like to reproduce in excellent quality a large number of 30x40 b+w prints from film. Printing again would yield too much variation from original print, too cumbersome. Scans, expensive and slow.

Don't really understand, having been an analogue guy for so long, the need to scan if e.g. a reproduction with a good digital camera yields (almost ??) the same usable output. Does it?

Preconditions?

I have a large flat bed scanner that I hardly ever use and I was never really happy with when I got it. I also have a high end slide scanner that also does negatives. I use it a LOT because I have at least 20,000 slides that should be digitalized. But, I have at least a hundred photo albums filled with old pictures that I no longer have the negatives for. Some of the pictures I just laid on the floor with good lighting and used my Pentax point and shoot to take a digital photo of the original print. They turned out pretty well, considering some pictures lost a lot of the original colours. They are a little cloudy, but usable. Taking digital photos of sharp black and white pictures does a much better job. I've done some of my grandparents that were originally take over 100 years ago. I was very pleased with the results.

This was a digital photo of an old print that was fading.

This is a 50 year old picture of me done the same way.

encouraging!

I don't have my slides and negatives digitalized, too much only archived

using the quickest video recorder which did slide/negatives too=

Fuji FV10 much cheaper than any scanner at the time. Scanned the negative strip an a matter of minutes, added comments on Cumulus databank by Canto.com

http://goo.gl/8ZPQM

The output is totally ok for archiving, i.e seeing the image with enough detail and where the actual image is physically filed away.

Don't know if it's still in production.

Very likely something better is around by now.

If interested see under slide scanner

http://goo.gl/bsajh