dpi for scans

[Shelley McElney]

Hi
I have lots of slides that I shot in China 25 years ago ad I want to scan them. Can anyone tell me what the optimum dpi setting would be to scan Kodachrome 64-135 slides with no loss of resolution?

[Chris Hawkins]

Resolution of film is always going to open to debate. However, with 64-135 you need to go to about 12mp, which for 35mm media is about 4000dpi. Much less and you will loose detail, much more and you'll be creating files that are large for the sake of it.

One other important thing - make sure you scan at 12 to 16 bit colour depth rather than 8bit, which is sometimes the default.

Hope that helps.