Hias From Germany, joined Sep 2000, 349 posts, RR: 16 Reply 1, posted (11 years 6 months 3 weeks 3 days ago) and read 3358 times:
In my opinion, slides are better to archive compared to prints. In Europe a slide film is much more cheaper than a color print film. A slide film costs about 3.50 US$ including processing compared to 2.50 US$ for a print film, but you have to buy slide frames. For 200 frames you pay 7 US$. That's about 13 cents for a complete slide, while you have to pay for one print about 40 cents for the print itself without the film.
Slides are also sharper than pictures and can be used better for publications. That is also a disadvantage of the slide film: On a slide you see every unsharpness and bad lighting condition.
Ckw From UK - England, joined Aug 2010, 324 posts, RR: 19 Reply 2, posted (11 years 6 months 3 weeks 2 days 23 hours ago) and read 3356 times:
Slides are generally better than negs for quality, full stop. You will see better colour saturation, sharpness and resolution in a 100ASA slide than a print from a 100ASA neg. Part of this is down to the printing process. In comparing the colour neg to the slide, the difference is not so marked - films like Fuji Reala being capable of very fine results. If you are scanning, the difference between a scanned slide and scanned neg may be negligable. In fact I find it sometimes easier to get a good scan from a neg than from a slide.
Negative film is much more tolerant of overexposure than slide film, something to keep in mind when shooting aircraft - very easy to get washed out skies on slide film.
Regarding cost - when I was last in Montreal (10 years+!) slide film was significantly more expensive than print. E6 processing could be found at a good price if you went to a professional lab and were prepared to mount your own slides. Process paid films such as Kodachrome were very expensive in comparison.
If you use E6 films, you can process your own, just like black and white. The proceedure is very similar, but you have to work at higher temperatures and control the temperature and time very closely. This does reduce the cost significantly - I can process a roll of 36 for about £1 in the UK.
Bodobodo From Canada, joined May 2000, 553 posts, RR: 15 Reply 3, posted (11 years 6 months 3 weeks 2 days 19 hours ago) and read 3348 times:
Hi Nicolas,
I haven't done much shopping around yet but the best deal that I found in Montreal is $9.99 for a roll of 36 exposure Fuji Sensia II ISO 100 film including processing at LL Lozeau. Considering a print film might be around $3-4 plus $6 to 9 for processing for only 24 exposures the slides do work out to be cheaper. These slides come mounted. If anyone knows of a good deal in Montreal for the same thing or much cheaper for unmounted processing please let me know. Unfortunately they just raised the price to $11.99 so if I find another source I will let you know. It should still work out to be somewhat cheaper than prints.
One thing to consider about slides is whether you still want to submit them here. If so then you will obviously need to have access to a slide scanner. In my case I just switched to slides (very happy with the results so far) but I already was scanning my negatives with a slide/negative scanner so no extra investment in scanning equipment was required to continue my submissions. Other equipment which will help would be a loupe (a magnifying lens to examine your slides for sharpness) and a lightbox.
As others have mentioned there isn't as much forgiveness for poor exposure with slide film as there is with negative film but with certain films like Sensia it is still quite reasonable and you can do a lot of repairs on the computer (as long as the exposure is still reasonable). If you are having problems with underexposed or overexposed negatives than you may want to try resolving that before trying slides. It does seem so far that scanning from slides is more demanding than scanning from negatives but the sharpness and definately the colours do seem to be much better than with negatives. The other good thing about slides is that you can see how the colours really were (or at least how the film rendered the colour) rather than making the guesses about the original colours that are involved with negative film. There is always some interpretation about the colours when printing or scanning negative film.
Let me know if you feel like heading out to the airport sometime soon again (once we have a decent day on the weekend)!
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