Slide Scanning Service

[RichardBattersby]

Hello,

I have a large number of 35mm slides that were my fathers. They're mostly of railways and there are some incredibly atmospheric and useful pictures which I'd like to digitise and then upload onto a website so people can see / use them.

Obviously I've googled and there are various companies out there that can do this for me. I think due to time constraints and the volume of slides, this would be preferable, but if prohibitively expensive I could consider buying a scanner myself.

Does anyone have any thoughts / experiences about such services?

Thanks.

[Bealman]

I am faced with a similar dilemma.

I get the impression that if you do it yourself, it's a one slide at a time operation.

As well as being slow and tedious, it would be an impossible task, as I'd end up looking at each slide as the memories came back, and it would take forever!

[RichardBattersby]

I'm not sure what to do. I've had a 'quick look' and I think I have around 2000 slides!! This would almost certainly be too expensive for me to use a scanning service. But to do it myself looks like a lifetime's work. I guess there's a reason it costs what it does.

Anyone with any experiences?

[emjaybee]

My father had a similar problem.

You can buy software packages that come with a A4 slide holder that enables you to do a full sheet in one hit. My father isn't techie at all and he had no problems doing it. If I get the chance this evening I'll see if he remembers the  software packages.

[keithfre]

I have a Reflecta 3 in 1 Scanner which works OK (1800 dpi, so not great quality). It's essentially a digital camera in a box with facilities for loading slides, negatives and photos. I bought it in preference to a dedicated slide scanner as I thought it would be handy for scanning photos as well, but in practice I can get better quality from photos using my old printer-scanner.

How about scanning rough images using a simple slide scanner to show what you've got and allowing people to order professional scans at an appropriate price?

[rhysapthomas]

I have had the same problem with several thousand old slides taken in the 70s and 80s which i am never going to project again
In the end i bought a Plustek 7500i from Ebay for about £100.  These are still manufactured and availble new for £2-300.  They arn't in the Nikon league but cost much less.  One good thing was updates are still available for the scanner and the software
I am reasonably pleased with the results having scanned about 150 slides.  They go into a carrier 4 at a time and must moved into position manually.  Depending on the options chossen scanning takes 30s -1min each slide.  The software is quite complex with a lot of options to explore.  On a good kodachrome slide the results are excellent but may still need some photoshop work.  The worst slides were ones with large dark areas which developed some artifacts on scanning

Not to difficult when you get started and there is a quick precan to help with sorting

[themadhippy]

beg borrow or steal a slide projector with a carrasole   and video the slide show.

[Malc]

I have a slide scanner that took 5 negs or slides in a carrier. If the slides were in a plastic holder, you had to take them out. A great scanner, fully motorised and the software with it colour corrected old slides. The one problem with it was the fact that it worked off a parallel port under windows 98 and the manufacturer went bust. I tried a USB to parallel adaptor, but the drivers wouldn't work under any later version of Windows.

[Paul-H]

Hi

Having done this myself last year I can offer some viable options

1 is to buy second hand one of the best consumer grade slide scanners ever made, the Minolta 5400, it scsns at 5400 dpi and you load 4 slides at a time and let it auto scan them, you will need Vuescan pro for it to work under modern operating systems but total cost will be under £400 and you can sell the scanner for what you paid for it one done.

Nikon also do a high quality scanner but they still command a high price, around a grand second hand the Minolta is almost as good but a fraction of the price.

2 is if you have an SLR digital camera is to buy a slide copier and copy them one area time, slow but much quicker than most modern slide scanners that can take 5 minutes to scan one image.

3 if you have a digital camera and can take macro 1:1 images and have a tripod and light box, is photograph each side on the lightbox, this method works well for medium format and larger images.

I used option one to archive thousands of 35mm slides and negatives and option 3 to archive thousands of medium format negatives.

Once finished I sold the scanner for more than I paid for it.

Paul

[RichardBattersby]

Thanks all.

Paul-H I think I'll be using option 1. Unfortunately I don't think I'll manage to get this sorted before I move house but this seems like a sensible option given the number of slides I have.

[broadsword]

I've tried a couple of cheap scanners and it's money wasted, I'm going to try using a DSLR
and a home made slideholder , I've had quite good results taking closeups of bugs etc, so I'll
see what happens. Some of the scanners come with a set up disk,but the cheap ones were
useless.

[Paul-H]

The cheap ones are little more than an old 5mp digital camera, with very poor quality optics, to be avoided at all cost.

[Papyrus]

I too had this job to do. I started off by buying a supposed slide-copier which was totally useless. In the end I borrowed my stepson's Epson flatbed scanner (can't remember the model now). This came with a number of attachments including one for slides which held something like 18 at a time, so you could zip through them at a fantastic rate. The quality also is excellent - here is one I prepared thusly...



I ended up digitising my slides, my wife's, my late Dad's and quite a lot of prints too. If such devices are still available, I thoroughly recommend one.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Chris

[Paul-H]

The flatbed option is still available with Epson and possibly Canon making them, but they do have a couple of drawbacks

1. The dynamic range is less than a good dedicated film scanner so it's quit easy to lose shadow and or highlight detail.

2. They are all fixed focus and with slide mounts varying in thickness and film having different amounts of curl they results my not be as sharp as the originals, although that my not be an issue depending on what you want to do with them. If you only view on your computer monitor and dont zoom in on detail if won't be much of an issue.

3. A good Epson flatbed with film scanner is probably more expensive than a dedicated 35mm  film scanner,  but if you have Medium or Large format slides they are a no brainer, as a dedicated 10x8 film scanner costs many thousands.

Paul

[d-a-n]

I have a Plustek 8100i which is ace. If you set it on a lower resolution, you'll soon blow through the slides and you can always choose ones to go back and scan at a higher resolution and or take more time over in post processing. Just be meticulous with your slide and file naming to allow easy cataloging