We have two Canon scanners and one has an attachment to back light slides and negative. It does a decent job - about the same quality of my original Nikon dedicated slide/negative scanner - but does not have the superior software of the Epson V800 scanner.
I feel for your brother - we inherited my families photos and genealogy and my husband's family photos and genealogy. I made the decision to not post the photos to places like Ancestry - they take ownership and control. I had my own website from when I bred horses so now most of what gets posted are family photos. I prefer to keep control of the family photos though I will share them with people who are interested.
I've also shared photos and information with the Florida Archives. The town where my Dad grew up was a company owned town that was destroyed in the 1950s when the company wanted to mine the phosphate under the town. My grandfather and my Dad took photos of the town, mostly as background for family pics, from 1925 through the period when the houses were being moved out of the town, plus there are photos of phosphate mining from those years. The Florida Photographic Archives loved the ones I have already shared and I have more I need to take to them!
I think the technology is almost maxxed out - as I said before I don't try to scan higher than 3200 dpi because the film grain starts to show up too much. I began scanning slides and negatives before 2000 and the software is now what is making a huge different. Dedicated slide/negative scanners now have software that can eliminate the dust particles and reduce the apparent scratches. In addition, once you spend a little time with PhotoShop, their tools for repairing damage and cleaning up old photos is amazing.
The other part is storage and memory. When I first started I could not scan at high resolution because I simply could not store or process the bigger images. Now I have 32GB RAM, a 128 GB scratch disk (for PhotoShop to use while working with the images), and 6 TB of storage.
My main problem is time and worrying that I won't live long enough to scan everything and get it organized!
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