X-mas time! My wife wants to get her father something to digitize all of the slides that he has(hundreds). I explained to her that many folks offer the service for a very good price. Just send in the slides and they take care of the rest. But she has a good point in the fact that he is retired and has lots of spare time and of course likes tech toys. I have a canon flatbed that can do slides and of course have it plugged into CS4. On the other hand my father-in-law has trouble with getting too complicated with software and the like( I have had to "fix" his computer a few times).
What scanner would you folks recommend for around 100 bucks. It can be dedicated for slides. I'm not sure what photo editing software he uses, but last I looked it was Paint Shop Pro (JASC?).
newseum wrote:
X-mas time! My wife wants to get her father something to digitize all of the slides that he has(hundreds). I explained to her that many folks offer the service for a very good price. Just send in the slides and they take care of the rest. But she has a good point in the fact that he is retired and has lots of spare time and of course likes tech toys. I have a canon flatbed that can do slides and of course have it plugged into CS4. On the other hand my father-in-law has trouble with getting too complicated with software and the like( I have had to "fix" his computer a few times).
What scanner would you folks recommend for around 100 bucks. It can be dedicated for slides. I'm not sure what photo editing software he uses, but last I looked it was Paint Shop Pro (JASC?)....Show more →
I wonder a bit if at that price range sending it in might not be better, especially if he lots of K64 which are. People often spend an order of magnitude more than that on equipment, or more, to try to do scanning well, especially Kodachrome. But maybe something could do a quick little decent enough job.
It takes a lot of time to scan slides. I think it may take me 10 years to finish. (doing a very careful job and yet not even the most careful, which would be wet mounting but then I'd take maybe 25 years to finish!, using Nikon 9000+silverfast (and BTW you CAN get all those Nikon Coolscans to work on Windows 7 64bit )
There used to be a device that mounted the camera (like a lens) and the slide went into the end....and in effect it became like photographing what was originally photographed...if that makes sense!
I see them on sBay sometimes...can't remember what they are called....'slide duplicators?'
anthonygh wrote:
There used to be a device that mounted the camera (like a lens) and the slide went into the end....and in effect it became like photographing what was originally photographed...if that makes sense!
I see them on sBay sometimes...can't remember what they are called....'slide duplicators?'
yeah i think that is what they are called, they even had the back in the film epoch
hmm although then he'd need some sort of DSLR and even a used rebel is gonna be more than $100 i think
but so would sending them all in to a service
Thank you all for the replies. Much appreciated. My wife and her brother went in together and got him the Epson V600 at B&H for $159.95 w/ free shipping. That's a great deal!
It doesn't necessarily take long to scan slides - but it does take a long time to scan them well. Then again, if all that is required are scans that perhaps fill the screen and may be printed at 6"x4" then scanning them "well" is not a high priority. Also in that case the external scan services are quite adequate.
Personally I would not use a service that required me to send my slides far away by mail, and I would not get too many done at once in case they got lost.
Over 10 years ago I was silly enough to think that a 600 dpi flatbed scanner would do the trick. I knew so little back then Then I got a 1900 dpi slidescanner and was still disappointed but this time it was not so much the dpi that let me down as the fact that the scanner was crappy. Then I got a Nikon LS4000 and the results were much better even at the low resolution of 2000dpi - it just had far better optics in it. In some ways it's like using the cheapest and nastiest consumer lens vs an excellent pro-grade lens to take your pictures with. Then I discovered how much time was required to scan, correct for colour balance, sharpness, exposure, etc., save the file with a name that let me find it, as well as to label and store the slides so that they can be cross-referenced with the scans in case a rescan is required for the occasional gems (imagine that you have the inferior scan but can no longer find the slide in a hurry), and it was a shock to realise that 5-10 minutes per slide was easily spent. I simply ran out of time.
Nikon don't support the slide scanners as well as they used to and I'll end up trying my Epson v700 scanner eventually. I bought it partly for that purpose. It won't be better than the dedicated Nikon slidescanner but it should be appreciably faster for not too much loss of scan quality.
And nowadays I have the benefit of better image management software such as Lightroom, as well as much greater computer power and storage capacity.
A lot of my slides I want because of the memories they invoke rather than because of the technical quality of the image or the slide. Some are irreplaceable because the subjects have changed or disappeared. In that case almost any scan is better than no scan. Your father-in-law may find the same thing. Other slides are easily replaced by taking new photos. A decision has to be made whether to scan them all and then sort them out, or sort them out with a slide viewer / projector and then scan what is wanted most. Both workflows gobble up time so both are probably as good as each other.
Unless your father-in-law gets bored easily this project could last him for months or even years.
(doing a very careful job and yet not even the most careful, which would be wet mounting but then I'd take maybe 25 years to finish!, using Nikon 9000+silverfast (and BTW you CAN get all those Nikon Coolscans to work on Windows 7 64bit 
)