Scanning slides - which route to take?

[M. Worthington]

I have a stash of old slides I need to convert to digital images. I'm talking maybe 1,500 in all.

What's the best route to take?

I'm looking at a flatbed scanner, Epson. But would a dedicated slide scanner be the better option? I've not done this at all, so I have no idea.

[blumesan]

You don't say for what purpose you wish to scan these slides. If simply to archive the slides and nothing more, then any scanner will do. However if you have the desire to make reasonably large prints of good quality (now or in the future), then you really need a dedicated film (slide) scanner, not a flatbed. Going this route with a large number of slides is a long and tedious job. I would suggest you get your hands on a slide projector and spend a couple of evenings culling the collection for those images worth scanning (and post-processing). If your collection is anything like mine you will end up selecting about 2 in 5 for further work.

Cheers/Mike

[JDArt]

There's also a thread here on this topic:

http://www.photocamel.com/index.php/topic,1421.0.html

[Aussiejoe]

Hi,
I had about 1000 slides I wanted to digitise, I tried many and various methods of making light-boxes to use my flatbed scanner, none of which provided suitable quality output.

I eventually bought a piece of fine textured card about 3' x 2' and projected onto that and photographed them with my digital camera, it took a lot of work, the biggest problem was dust, didn't matter how well I cleaned the slides or the projector, there was always dust on the image, it wouldn't be noticed viewing the projected slides as normally done but in photos a different story.

These were old slides some over 40 years old, and in some the emulsion in the slides seemed to be breaking down and colours had faded greatly, so there was a mountain of work involved in cloning out dust spots, scratches and colour bleed creeping in from the edges and restoring the colours. Over all the end result was pretty fair, they were at least as good as ordinary scanned photographs, not Pro quality but at least I had been able to preserve them in digital format.

If you could buy or make an adaptor to directly photograph them I think with hindsight I would go that way.

Aussiejoe

[danwolfgang]

Originally Posted by blumesan

... If simply to archive the slides and nothing more, then any scanner will do...

Wow, do I wholeheartedly disagree! Archiving requires a scan of the utmost quality because it's for *archiving.* You don't know what you might want to do with it in the future, so you want the best possible scan you can get for the archive. That means that if you decide in 5 years that you want an 8 x 10 of it, you need to have scanned it well enough to be able to print it!

Always, always, always choose a film scanner over a flatbed for film. Two links:
http://www.danandsherree.com/2004/08...lides_and_.php
http://www.danandsherree.com/2005/10...techniques.php

Dan

[blumesan]

Originally Posted by danwolfgang

Wow, do I wholeheartedly disagree! Archiving requires a scan of the utmost quality because it's for *archiving.* You don't know what you might want to do with it in the future, so you want the best possible scan you can get for the archive. That means that if you decide in 5 years that you want* an 8 x 10 of it, you need to have scanned it well enough to be able to print it!
Dan

I think your disagreement would be less "wholehearted" if you read the rest of my post. I said essentially the same thing you did.