Scanning 35mm slides

Mr_Toad

Gloomendoom wrote: »

Sorry for your loss.

I have been looking at 35mm slide scanners recently, for similar reasons.There are lots of 'toy' slide scanners available for £20 upwards but the cheapest new scanners worth buying are probably made by Plustek. I'm looking at their 8200i. The 'i' denotes that it has an infra red channel which means that it can effectively recognise dirt and dust on the film and automatically correct the scanned image. If you have a lot of slides to copy, this feature could save time. On the negative side (sorry), the Plustek scanners only have a manual feed. If you want an auto feed then, even second hand, you are looking at big money.

The big money aspect of an auto feed is something I'm coming to realise as I look into this.

It looks like it will take a bit longer to do than I first thought.

Shimrod

Mr_Toad wrote: »

The big money aspect of an auto feed is something I'm coming to realise as I look into this.

Even if you go for a scanner with an autofeed (and from my brief glance on ebay it looked like that was comfortable 4 figures cost), there is the time for scanning in.

I have a Nikon Coolscan IV, which is around 12 years old now which does slides, but I bought it for processing negatives. It takes me about 1.5 hours to scan 36 negatives, 6 at a time. That doesn't include any time to adjust any of the scan parameters or apply basic editing.

Good luck and don't forget to buy a bigger hard drive and back up software/devices before you start!

eta: If your budget does stretch to 4 figures, this one will scan 100 slides at a time http://www.wexphotographic.com/buy-reflecta-digitdia-6000-slide-scanner/p1545344

nigem

I have an HP Scanjet, which will scan 6 slides at a time. I had a Groupon deal for 250 slides ( about £50 I think). The quality was better on the professional CD, but the home scanned ones were adequate for my own and my families use.

neilwoods

That's a lot of slides. Did you have a price in mind. Can get a slide scanner for about £1200 and will scan 100 slides in about 4 minutes. Probably the sort of equipment a company would use if you sent your slides off.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reflecta-DigitDia-6000-Slide-Scanner/dp/B005LOJ1KA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1392331947&sr=8-1&keywords=Reflecta+DigitDia+5000

Shimrod

neilwoods wrote: »

That's a lot of slides. Did you have a price in mind. Can get a slide scanner for about £1200 and will scan 100 slides in about 4 minutes.

I think you'll find that is 4 minutes per slide at the highest resolution!

Neil49

I started a similar project some years ago and found it to be a very frustrating and time consuming process. I started off with a cheaper scanner but immediately found problems with colour correction with old slides (from the 1960's). They were on Kodak film and looked fine (in colour terms) if you held them up or looked at them via a hand viewer, but when scanned they had a cool blue (I think) hue which was very time consuming to correct using Photoshop. Even then I wasn't happy with the results.

I then purchased a Primefilm scanner which came with built in colour correction and dust/scratch removal software (they called it ICE3). With this, the colour quality was about 95% correct and fine tuning with Photoshop resulted in satisfactory results.

All this takes time and you need a powerful computer processor, a shed load of memory and a decent graphics card and be prepared to scan at high quality levels if you want a sharp photo. My pc wasn't really up to the task (a pentium i3 with 4gb ram which was the latest model at the time) and made the whole process frustrating (yes, I've used that word before).

Given the quantity of slides you have I suggest you spend a decent amount of money on a good quality scanner which, when you have finished, you can sell on to someone else who is embarking on a similar project.

Yes, it's worth doing but I recommend you have a bit of a sort out and select the ones to be scanned. If you have a multitude of shots of general hill or beach scenes with no one on them then just scan one (or don't bother). Will you ever look at it again?

Finally, just remember to backup onto a secure form of storage (and keep a copy of that off-site). DVD's can get damaged, hard drives can fail so you may have to look at cloud storage.

Hope this helps.

Mr_Toad

neilwoods wrote: »

That's a lot of slides. Did you have a price in mind. Can get a slide scanner for about £1200 and will scan 100 slides in about 4 minutes. Probably the sort of equipment a company would use if you sent your slides off.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reflecta-DigitDia-6000-Slide-Scanner/dp/B005LOJ1KA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1392331947&sr=8-1&keywords=Reflecta+DigitDia+5000

That looks like the sort of thing I'm after.

Although the cost is high I could use some of my inheritance to buy it. I would then have the means to do full justice to Dad's photographs.

Something more to ponder upon.

Mr_Toad

Neil49 wrote: »

All this takes time and you need a powerful computer processor, a shed load of memory and a decent graphics card and be prepared to scan at high quality levels if you want a sharp photo. My pc wasn't really up to the task (a pentium i3 with 4gb ram which was the latest model at the time) and made the whole process frustrating (yes, I've used that word before).

Given the quantity of slides you have I suggest you spend a decent amount of money on a good quality scanner which, when you have finished, you can sell on to someone else who is embarking on a similar project.

Finally, just remember to backup onto a secure form of storage (and keep a copy of that off-site). DVD's can get damaged, hard drives can fail so you may have to look at cloud storage.

Hope this helps.

I have a top end Mac with 16GB RAM along with Photoshop, lightroom etc. that I use for processing pictures and video so no problem there.

I also have plenty of drive space, my NAS currently has 4TB attached and I have several more 2TB drives still in boxes courtesy of a project I did at work just before I retired. They were surplus to requirement and were given to me as they were taking up space in the lab.

tyllwyd

If you've got images from different decades, I wonder if it might be worth looking into selling the non-personal ones online. It might be nice to think that his work was being seen by a wider audience?

Mr_Toad

tyllwyd wrote: »

If you've got images from different decades, I wonder if it might be worth looking into selling the non-personal ones online. It might be nice to think that his work was being seen by a wider audience?

Now that's something I never considered. :cool:

Got to get them scanned first though.