Any recommendations for a good slide scanning service? I'm looking to have my father's slides digitized -- approximately 2500 slides. I have little interest in trying to DIY this project.
Some time back--a decade or more?--my parents used Scancafe to digitize their slides, negatives, super 8 films, and some prints. They were pleased. I have no current experience with the outfit.
At the time, my folks chose Scancafe based on my review of available options. But that review is far from current.
Agree with you--scanning a bunch of slides is a horrible DIY project. I have a good Nikon scanner and automatic slide feeder, and have long recommended to friends that they not borrow it (though I would certainly let them) and just outsource the work.
Scanning slides is a time consuming project. 2500 is a rather large number of slides. I started a project where I copy images made between 1966 and 1994..when I began scanning negatives/transparencies. I decided to start with making contact sheets and then only choosing images of interest. I was never happy with my scans of the images below, so I included these in my project. I was groom and photographer. My mother in law said marry my daughter or stop seeing her and days later this was the result. No time for planning..so slides shot on a point and shoot Contax camera. Today’s my wife’s birthday. Her mother did me a great favor. I’m providing a link vs posting an image because these are very high resolution X2D pixelshift files. This would require storing the slides in plastic sheets that fit into a three ring binder, but might greatly reduce the work required for scanning. You can see the resolution by fully magnifying the view in Flickr.
One thing to bear in mind:
Installing Tahoe will disable Nikon Scanners (and probably several other makes as well?) because Tahoe no longer supports connections to Firewire devices.
You need to keep an old Mac, or forego the upgrade, if you plan to use a scanner.
