Scanning B&W negs

[Groth]

 I just received a long anticipated lot of my fathers 4x5 negs from his stint in Signal Corp in '46 in Europe.
 My daughter gave me a Epson scanner(V300). I anticipate getting a 2TB ext hard drive to help store files.
 I have printed b&w, worked as custom printer, even retouched negs 'back in the day'...but this is new ground and I thought some in my AH family may have some hard earned tips and knowledge so I miss some pot-holes on this new road.
  Thanks in advance.
              JGroth
                        PS I also want to 'watermark'' any prints I post....

[jigsaw]

V300 only comes with an adapter for 35mm.  V700 will go up to 8x10 but I don't know if the adapters are interchangeable.  If you get past the adapter problem, try to scan at 600dpi for a decent print quality. If you're just going for web use, 300dpi is ok.  It's better to scan bigger and downsize than scan small and try to upsize.

If you find some images that you would like higher print quality or want blown up bigger than 8x10, look for a place that can do "drum scanning" with TIFF output,  which can get pricey but it will give the best prints.

Costco and a lot of other places have scanning services that could be another option, but they wont be drum scan quality. Usually 300dpi JPGs from such places.

If you already have something like Photoshop, you can make an action and batch process watermarking pretty easily. Make sure to keep unmarked set for prints.  If you don't have PS or something similar, there are a lot of free/shareware apps you can find online.

[Chalenge]

Another method is a little more time consuming and expensive, but worth considering. You can rent a very high definition camera and macrobel (sometimes called rapid-rail) system. Mamiya makes one in the 80MP range, which may be high for what you are doing, but certainly better than the scanner method. You will certainly get more detail depending on the quality of the originals. Negatives do degrade over time, so you should check them out before going crazy. Even a 16MP camera is great, but there are many, many macrobel systems you could use if you have a good camera supply center nearby.

The macrobel system is much slower, because each negative is framed individually before photographing. But, depending on how valuable you consider the images. . .

Nothing beats the convenience of scanner and Photoshop.

[Groth]

 Ty Jigsaw & Chalenge...                         
 The negs are in great condition....especially since I was told 2 years ago they'd been thrown away.
 And I def want them recorded at high res....thought of making my own masks for 4x5....
                                                                                           JGroth