Digital contact sheets

[Panos Nanitsos]

I would like to bulk scan my whole collection, a few hundred rolls of negative film and slides, and make digital contact sheets. I have an Umax 2200 flatbed, which can scan slides and negatives, however it cannot process an entire negative film at once. If I could use the whole area of the flatbed then I could scan 24 framed slides or an entire film.

Problem is that the twain driver from Umax limits the scan area to fit the built-in slide light box. This is fixed and I can’t change this in software. What I would like to do is turn on the slide function and place a Hama light box on top of the glass plate and then scan the entire plate in one go.

My question is, does the Silverfast driver let me override the default factory settings and thus scan the entire flatbed in slide/negative mode?

I am not attached to the Umax 2200 in particular. As a first step I just want to catalogue everything and see later about high quality scans. I would be grateful for any suggestions, software based or a tip for another scanner.

[EpsonUser]

If you are only after a record of your photos and are not at all concerned about quality, you could try the following: lay out your negatives on the glass, using as much of the area as necessary. Put the white based reflective insert into the top, and scan as a reflective (rather than a transparency) negative. The result will be fairly ugly but you will at least have a quick record of all the negatives on the roll.