Digital BW, The Print

>Just discovered that a couple of hundred rolls of 35mm black and white
>negatives I've been carting around for about 25 years (and had been planning
>to start working with again, digitially) have become separated from their
>contact sheets, perhaps permanently. I'm wondering if it's possible to scan
>these in, a roll at a time, to make electronic contact sheets, using an
>ordinary flatbed scanner. My first attempts were utter failures -- they
>scanned in much too dark, so that when inverted in Photoshop were much too
>light, and fiddling with the white and black points did not improve things
>much -- but I'm wondering if anyone has successfully done this, and if so
>how. I'm really loathe to re-enter the chemical darkroom after two decades
>plus away.
>
>Thanks,
>David

David - I think it depends on what kind of quality you hope to have in 
the contact sheets.  I have an Epson 836 XL with the transparency 
adapter, and I've had good luck scanning rolls of negatives that have 
been cut in strips and placed in Print File-type holders.  I put that 
right on the glass since it's a lot quicker than loading the strips of 
film into the real holders that came with the scanner, and scan them into 
an 8 x 10" file that I save as a tiff at at least 300 dpi so that I can 
examine individual frames.  The scanner came with LaserSoft Silverfast, 
which is a nice scanning software, and I haven't had many problems with 
scanning negatives.  You just have to make sure that your settings are 
correct in the pre-scan stage.

Stephen