Film Developing - Prints vs Tiffs vs Negatives

My sister told me yesterday she has lots of undeveloped films from the 90s and early 2000s,which she'd like to do something with, including some decent sized prints. Having an SC-P5000 the printing is no problem, but quality-wise is it best to get them developed as 6x4 prints and scan the ones we want bigger myself (I have an Epson V850), or to get them straight to CD (they offer a res of 5444x3649), or even just get the negs and scan myself?

Personally, if we are talking about 16 bit tiffs, or top definition jpegs, I would go for the CD option. 5444x3649 is a respectable size, and will save you a lot of time. Much cheaper than making prints of everything also.

David

You might want to ask Admin to move this to the Film Photography Talk forum.

The first thing to do IMHO is to assess how good and/or interesting the images are in two respects: were they well shot in the first place and did the films age well enough to be still usable?
I would suggest that once the films are developped either you get contact prints or you have them scanned. Then you'll be able to choose which ones are good enough to be printed. If you scanned the films you can then print the good shots with your professional printer.
Nick

Admin - if you would, please? 😀

I scan all my own film, which is why I’d recommended just getting the lab to scan everything and put it onto CD. Unless you particularly like the idea of scanning thousands of images you will be saving yourself a lot of trouble. Plus it’s normally cheaper to have them scanned at the same time as they're developed (rather than trying to decide what’s worth scanning and going back and having it done individually)

If you've got film that was exposed 25 years ago , you need to get it developed first to see if anything is even useable .
Don't waste money on high quality scans on all of before you see them .
Maybe have them developed and scanned at a low ( cheapest ) option , or develop and print at 6x4 .

You can expect colour shifts , some tones missing etc .
Think '70's enprints !

If there's anything worth scanning , then get the negatives scanned .
High resolution scans aren't cheap , especially if you've a lot of film .
There's a good chance 90% of what's on them aren't much more use than just scanning at a low resolution and keeping for memories sake .
If the film was stored well in a fridge / freezer , the captured exposures might still be if good enough quality to print big , but I'd be surprised.

Personally , I'd develop them then either batch scan on a flatbed scanners or use a digital camera and take it from there .