If you had a choice, we sometimes asked, which would give the best results?
OK, you’ve got photo prints, negatives and slides. In practice we can quickly rule out a choice between photo scanning and slide scanning. It’s exceptionally rare that anyone would have any volumes of slides from which prints had been made, so the slide would be your only source material and you’ll have to go with that.
Photos started out as negatives, so you should have a negative to go with each of the prints. Technically its undoubted that negative scanning yields a better image than photo scanning. Don’t blame us for that, it’s down to a thing called dynamic range. That’s a measure of the spread of colour information a photo or negative can handle. negatives normally have great range, commercial prints much less. So all your colours, particularly the details in the shadows and highlights, get compressed and lost in the printing process. Negative scanning catches that, photos have lost it already.
But .... we can scan photos at a much lower cost than negatives, so most people opt to have their photos scannned.
