Between trip planning and thinking about Boskone, I've been thinking a fair bit about Japan recently. I took a whole bunch of pictures when I was there, with a camera borrowed from my parents, and looking at them now, my first thought is "Boy, I could make these look really good in GIMP..."
Of course, save for a few that I scanned in (the picture at left is a cut-down version of one of those), these are all on paper, not in electronic format, and scanning them in doesn't produce the best quality, as you can see even in the small version.
This got me wondering, though: is there an efficient way to convert a large number of pictures (a couple hundred) from film to digital format? It seems like it ought to be possible to pay somebody to do this, but what sort of quality do you get? (I have the negatives, if that makes a difference.) Is it worth the bother?
(Yes, Google will provide dozens of companies that offer to do this sort of thing, but I'm more interested in hearing from people who may have some experience with using this service...)
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You can pay to do it, of course. The service bureau I used to work with isn't working with individuals any more, so they're no help. But there are lots of them around. In fact, most mid-range photo labs will now offer you a CD when you get film developed, so maybe they can do older negs too.
The better places will have a range of scan sizes available. They should be just like digital cameras -- look for what size images you get back. You shouldn't need anything exotic unless you want 30" prints.
If you have a bunch to do and want to spend time on it, you can get a film scanner; they run around $400 last I checked. But I'd guess that you'd prefer sending them out for $0.25/photo or something.
Quality should be OK. For the most part, if you have decent negatives, you'll get decent scans. I've had issues with highlight areas losing detail, but for snapshot-type use, it should be fine.
You can get reasonable results by using a flatbed scanner that can be set up to scan negatives or slides.
You can get extremely good results by using a dedicated film scanner. It's moderately tedious, and I find that some work in Photoshop is needed on each resulting digital file.
Your best bet might be to find a place to do the scanning for you. Since it sounds as though you're set up to do the later corrections/manipulations on the digital files, you might want to specify that they not try to produce a "finished product" but rather a "working copy."
If it were me, I think I'd have someone do a small test batch first before setting them loose on a couple of hundred.
Disclaimer - I am not a pro by any means, but got into this through wanting to digitize some of the boxes of slides I have on a shelf.
Here's the company I would probably go to near me. That doesn't directly help you but it might be a useful comparator:
http://www.cordcamera.com/callme.asp?callid=PSPricebook#FTD
For what you're doing, the low res scan would be enough. It's double my estimated price though -- $0.49/image, or $4.99 if you just want to do a whole roll.
My wife had a 40 year old slide that she had tried to scan on a flatbed scanner (using the slide attachment) without much success---it came out muddy and dark. So she took it to a Wolf Camera and had them do it; it came out beautifully.
I think Wal-Mart used to do this for something like 99 cents a pop (if they still offer the service, I expect it would be substantially cheaper). My father-in-law, who's an excellent photographer, swore by them. But I can't find any information about it on the site, so maybe they stopped doing it.
As previous commenters have said, film scanners are the way to go if you don't mind using up your time. You'll get superior resolution and color saturation from using a dedicated film scanner as opposed to an adapter for a flatbed scanner. Some of them can be pretty automated. They're a bit more expensive, but that said, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a couple floating around your school that you could borrow - it seemed that most academic departments I've been around bought a couple around the time that slide presentations began to transition into Powerpoint presentations.
A couple of hundred negatives would probably be a hard weekend of scanning. Hire an undergrad to do it.
Note that folm scanners are available for rent, if you want to do the scanning yourself.