Scanning Old Photos for Print & Video

[Ronald]

My brother and I are secretly working on a documentary project about my grandparents' lives and the general family. The other night, we researched the best way to scan old photos which, for us, has 3 purposes: digital archiving, printing, and video (documentary).

We scanned one photo (a 3.5x5 I believe) at 300, 600, and 1200 dpi, put all three versions on an SD card, viewed them on a flatscreen TV, and decided 600 dpi seemed to have the best screen quality, though not by much. We'd like to slowly pan and zoom on photos as you'd see in a documentary.

So at this point, I'm hoping that scanning at 600 dip in TIFF format is the best method for all 3 purposes. I haven't printed high quality versions of the scans but I would hope there wouldn't be a big difference between 300 and 600 (I read that basic old photos should be 300 dpi and nice portraits should be 600 dpi, and that too high a dpi can be bad for small photos). For format purposes, any photos we want to use in the documentary can be saved as JPEGs if needed.

Does this sound good? I'd hate to have to scan them twice.