Converting slides to digital??

[edawn]

This isn't totally off-topic, but I wasn't sure where else to put this question.
My parents have a bunch of slides that they would like to convert to digital images so they could be made into slideshows on CD's, etc... Would you recommend buying a scanner or just sending them to a service? I think they have about 300 slides (they've sorted and thrown out a lot already). I'm not sure it would be worth it to buy a scanner just for this job, unless there is one that is quite inexpensive but will do a decent job. Any ideas if such a scanner exists, or any suggestions for a trustworthy service that would do this for them?

Thanks in advance!

edawn

[Jetsprinter]

Edawn, my dad has just bought an adaptor that holds slides to fit his digital camera. I haven't seen any results yet but he is hoping to photograph all of his aging slides to preserve the images. I am not sure what sort of quality one can expect from this method but I am sure someone out there has had some experience with this method.

[edawn]

Originally Posted by Jetsprinter

Edawn, my dad has just bought an adaptor that holds slides to fit his digital camera. I haven't seen any results yet but he is hoping to photograph all of his aging slides to preserve the images. I am not sure what sort of quality one can expect from this method but I am sure someone out there has had some experience with this method.

Interesting...I've not heard of this option before. Do you know how much the adaptor cost? I'll be curious to hear how this works or if anyone else has ideas.

Elaine

[Jetsprinter]

He bought it in from the US and I think cost him around $45USD. As soon as he gets it sorted I will post an example Elaine.

[Paul Shields]

Originally Posted by edawn

This isn't totally off-topic, but I wasn't sure where else to put this question.
My parents have a bunch of slides that they would like to convert to digital images so they could be made into slideshows on CD's, etc... Would you recommend buying a scanner or just sending them to a service? I think they have about 300 slides (they've sorted and thrown out a lot already). I'm not sure it would be worth it to buy a scanner just for this job, unless there is one that is quite inexpensive but will do a decent job. Any ideas if such a scanner exists, or any suggestions for a trustworthy service that would do this for them?

Thanks in advance!

edawn

edawn

Scanning 300 slides is a lot of work. Even with a scanner that can process say 12 slides per batch, that's still around 25 batches. A lot of scanners have even less slides per batch, so it's quite a long job. I have a dedicated film scanner and it can take 10 minutes or more to scan 6 slides, so would take around 8 solid hours to scan 300 slides. You then have the processing of the slide (they nearly always will need a bit of tweaking unless you have a good automated workflow).

It can be a very time consuming task, but if you have the will to tackle it then now is actually a very good time to invest in a scanner. Epson do some very good flatbed scanners with transparency holders for around £80 ($150) - maybe less. They usually come with ICE, which is a very useful process to remove dust from the slide (there is always dust on slide). At the end of the job you will have a nice flatbed that will always be useful for other tasks.

There are lots of 3rd party services that will do this work for you, but note that 300 slides at a high resolution (say, 4000 DPI) will not be cheap - reckon on a few hundred dollars.