What's the consensus best brand/model to accomplish this?

As far as prints go, I've always had great success scanning them in and using photoshop to manipulate them and rename the files. Of course, I realize not all of us have access to adobe photoshop, but it works wonderfully for this kind of job. Slides are a different matter, because of their small size. I suppose one could scan at a very high DPI (i.e., a high resolution) and resize them in photoshop.
As for negatives, well I don't see why one would need to digitize them. When I go to get my film developed, I get a print of every single negative I have, so If I were you, I'd simply scan in the prints. If you do desire to scan in negatives though, perhaps because they're old and you've lost the original prints, photoshop has an "invert" command which would produce the correct colors/values once they are scanned in. The real difficulty with scanning in negatives though would be finding a scanner that could both scan at a high enough resolution to not affect the crispness of the photograph after it is enlarged as well as finding a scanner that faithfully scans in something that is usually quite dark, as negatives tend to be. You might be better off getting new prints of your best negatives.

My humble opinion is that slides can only be
successfully scanned using a dedicated film
scanner or a commercial drum or flatbed
which exceeds the budget of even the most crazed railfan.
The Nikon 4000/8000 scanner are probably the best
desktop type units as they
can do slides, color or bw negatives.
I have found that bw negative scanning
does not approach the quality of a
chemical print. For bw make your best
print with an enlarger and then flatbed
scan that print.
Color negatives scanned seem to work
out better than BW.
For computer display most of your scans
will be fine. I cannot imagine not using
photoshop (or a similar software package)
to get the best out of a shot.
It does not seem to me that you will
ever get the quality of image from a
scanner that you can get examining
a slide or negative with a loupe.

I second that emotion.

JAC

I was recently confronted by a situation where I needed to make images from very large black and white negatives (8x10s) for a PowerPoint presentation and did not have access to an enlarger that could handle that size for making prints or to a contact printer. I had an old flatbed scanner with a full transparency back (lights the entire scan area) and could have scanned them in negative mode to make positives, but that was quite slow for the number of images I needed to produce. I found the best solution was to put them on a quality light board and photograph each of them with a digital camera in negative mode. This created a negative of the negative (i.e.: a positive) but it still had some color content. I then ran them all through Photoshop Elements and used the "Remove Color" command to make them pure black and white, and then touched up the brightness and contrast for best use in PowerPoint. I was able to do several hundred images this way very quickly, and they look very good on the screen.

Imagers of Atlanta, Georgia does a great job scanning slides. They have a professional service. They scan the slide and supply the files at 4 resolutions on CD. They charge 90 cents a slide. They used to have a volume discount when I used them years ago.

www.imagers.com

I have to disagree with many of the posts. I am a professional photographer. I studied the zone system, including a week with Ansel Adams, so I know what a good print looks like! I've switched from the chemical darkroom, and now do all my work in the digital realm. I've made 10's of thousands of chemical black and white prints, many from my collection of over 3000 steam negatives.

I use an Epson 4990 scanner ($500), as it has a moving light source in the top, and handles 35mm-8x10 negatives and transparencies. I've scanned nearly my entire collection, then processed them in Photoshop. They are printed on an Epson 2400 ($650) printer (13x19 max). I can say that I am getting better prints than any I ever made in the darkroom. There is no comparison, you just plainly have more control. Now, I'm not saying the darkroom prints look bad, just that the digital prints look better.

I've also scanned many 35mm and 120 slides from the 50's and 60's. At 3200 or 4800 dpi, they come out superbly. The ability to color correct digitally is amazing. The one catch is, there's a learning curve involved!

Below is the entire image of a 35mm slide (Anscochrome) taken in 1954 in Hoquiam Washington. It was shot with a low end Exacta, it and was badly color shifted. The insert is a small section at 100% size of the scan. Note that the grain structure is nice and sharp. At 100% it would be a 30" print. This was the only image I had that showed a 100 crop section.



Here's the same train coming, with the shadow detail and vignetting repaired.



These both print very nicely as 12x8's.

Thank you all very much for the incredibly useful information.
I now intend to experiment a bit with a scanner or two under the supervision of an experienced advertising art director.
And a few classes at the Apple Store on Michigan Ave. in Chicago.
I'll post a few results in the next month or so.

Remember too that the quality of the original
matters. If you had a box cam, all the Photoshop
in the world won't make the shot into one
with a 8x10 plate cam.
Photoshop will make a huge differnce. A good
printer too.
I still have not seen 35mm bw negs , scanned,
print as nicely as a chemical job. Perhaps
it is me and I hope so!
You will get a tremedous kick seeing all
those old slides "digitally remastered".
Even you mistakes can be removed. It
really is the greatest thing!

Here's a shot I took while riding with my dad (NP conductor) on the Fort Lewis Local out of Tacoma WA, in 1969. It was a drizzly fall day, and I shot this on Tri-X film, using a Nikon F. You can see one of the tall Boeing cars that shipped assemblies to the Renton plant, in the background. They couldn't go on the Point Line, as they were too tall, so had to be hauled over the old Prairie line. Not long after this was taken, there was an oops, that took out a bridge with one of these cars that slipped through!

I never did get a good print out of it in the darkroom, although it wasn't too bad printed on #5 paper.

With local contrast control and some other tweaking in PS, it now prints nicely. The insert is the detail level if printed 12" x 18".



Hope this helps in your decision making.

Steve

Great shot.
Reminds me of my days in '68 - 69, head man on the Sycamore way freight on the old Cheap & Nothing Wasted. Nasty burs crawling into my pants above my socks, and me being too cool to just go ahead and tie train order string around my ankles.
Thanks.
Jim

Glad you like it! I was very lucky to have ridden just about every local that ran out of Tacoma. I got to know many NP guys, and several left me their photo collections.

One other thing I should mention. You must calibrate your monitor to get good results! Calibration tools have gotten very inexpensive, much cheaper than the ink you will waste on prints that don't come out looking like they appear on screen. Pantone makes several in the $90 to $200 range.

Any idea if they still have volume discounts? We have a very large collection of B/W negatives recently acquired (4000+), and we are looking for volume discounts on scanning.

TJ Gaffney