Owbist-- OMG! I found the answer on page 8. My printer is in an obscure place and all this time I THOUGHT it was set for "letter size" but it wasn't. I used a flashlight to be absolutely certain I was following directions and discovered the little button was set for 4 x 6, not letter size. I had to crane my neck and use a flashlight to see that the button selector was making the wrong size choice. One of my cats must have stepped on the button and changed the selection. All three cats are fascinated with the Epson so I don't know which to blame. ;-) Thank you for responding and guiding me to the answer to a terribly frustrating problem. Nancy

Oh, grandms, I thank you. I am having a good time putting together pictures of folks who have passed on and I miss.I feel this is the year I honor them on Pinterest of all places. Un huh. One of my boards is for them. It's that sort of thing. I need to connect and ressurect them. Hope you know what Pinterest is. Oh, that CC. I hope I am in good shape. Life goes on with a little helo from my friends ps: I rmember in the late 1970s and the company I worked for had a new OCR machine. That thing was a disaster and yet state of the art. Numbers where there were supposed to be letters and really no help at all. Now I have a scanner for $9 and change if you read above. Guess that was 32 years ago at least. Seems like yesterday. Ha ha. Thanks again for you good wishes.

We sure did and I was glad to see you response--I had no luck finding the thread. I sent about a dozen negatives to a commercial scanning service and received a CD with very high resolution scans. That was about the time I was hoping to do more myself to save money and got good information from you. My negatives are of varying sizes and quality. I still don't know to what degree a scanner can adjust to denser or thinner negs. Sometimes working with a professional isn't easy. Some of the hand selected negatives were contact printed by student interns is a real darkroom with decent results. I intend to use the best images in an exhibit or two and a PowerPoint presentation to celebrate and educate about a historic district I just got declared elibible for the National Register of Historic Places. I'll take the best legibility I can get and be happy for my goal. During a visit today with the prof, a contributor to my work, I basically heard way too much about the quality of the negatives--too thick, too thin, scratched, poor photographer, improperly stored 60 years ago. As a perfectionist in her craft, she sees these problems and says we can't do much. My approach is if there is a problem, let's solve it. I am at the stage of selling my approach and getting her going. No one had actually scanned anything with the Epson, so I suggested we give it a try since I drove there to see the scans. She put a decent 3x5 neg right on the glass and the Epson produced a great image. I inquired if there needed to be a negative holder and that drew a blank--despite what the reviews of the machine list. So right now I don't know too much except I have faith that if we can get any image it can be manipulated to a reasonable quality. I also found another on-line, reasonable scanning company, and they tell me they can handle about any quality and will send me images on line and I can pick and choose what I want and have to pay for. And the cost to do all my selected images will be less than the dozen I did before. The question here is--do you scan from the glass or always use a negative holder? Have you tried from the glass. I know you talked about one of the photo programs to work on you rscanned images. How much can you enhance a darker or lighter scan? Quite a response for only seeing one scan but I am frustrated by all the negative talk (yup, pun intended) Mike

I use an older Epson 1240U and it is tedious. Perhaps some day I will finish the ones sitting along side my computer table. I see that HP has a photo scanner, HP Scanjet G4050, that does as many as 16 slides at a time and sells for anywhere from about $100 to $200 -- Amazon to other places, new and used. It can scan 30 frames of 35mm strips at one time. PC Magazine gave it a pretty good rating. It took about a minute and a half to prescan and scan the 16. Compared to my older Epson that is speedy.