Converting old transparency slides to digital

droopsnoot

I have one of the cheapo Maplins ones, £20 when we had a new store opened locally or a bit more on line. It's been pretty good, but I've read about how the more expensive scanners do multiple passes and get a really good result compared to mine. It all depends on what's on the slides, whether you want the photos so you can easily look at them, or whether they're tip-top quality photos you want to use in an exhibition or print in large sizes. Mine takes either cardboard or plastic-mounted slides, or has another carrier for strips of six negatives. I've modified that carrier to have a slit in the end, as I had some negs on a single film that I wanted to scan without cutting up.

Mine is basically a webcam in a case, with a bit of software to automatically convert from b/w or colour negatives if required. It's OK, but it doesn't like XP SP3, so I have to use it on an old laptop that is still on an earlier SP. You can get a higher model of mine that scans directly to SD card, cutting out the PC altogether, but they were quite a lot more expensive at the time.

For me, it was just a case of risking £20 to see if it would do the job. It will only do 35mm slides, though - but that's all I have. I've had the scanner for about 2.5 years, so far have scanned around twenty slides - the trouble with it being cheap is I don't feel a need to use it much to get the value out of it.

Mr_Toad

I was looking at this some time ago as I have thousands of slides that my father took during a long life of serious photography.

Beware the cheaper offerings, they are usually just a poor quality camera that takes a picture when a light is shone through the slide. They don't really do justice to the original. See droopsnoot's post above.

A proper slide scanner is a lot more money and one that has an auto feed is even more.

I borrowed a top end Nikon scanner to try and results were impressive. However, it was a manual feed and based on how long it took to scan one slide I calculate that if I scan slides for eight hours a day for five days a week I'm not going to live log enough to scan them all.

I can't justify the cost of an auto feed scanner or the cost of getting them done professionally so in the end I decided it wasn't a viable project.

datostar

If you have a digital SLR camera, it's possible to use one of the slide adapters originally designed for film SLR cameras. They attach to the camera lens and hold the mounted slide at the correct distance for focus. Mount the camera securely in front of a suitable light source (which could be daylight), then photograph the slide. Voila, instant digital conversion! Some post-processing will probably be needed, but that's often the case with scanned slides too.

dodger1

Can recommend this one,

http://www.7dayshop.com/veho-smartfix-slide-and-negative-to-sd-card-film-scanner

Time consuming but definitely does the job.

droopsnoot

datostar wrote: »

If you have a digital SLR camera, it's possible to use one of the slide adapters originally designed for film SLR cameras. They attach to the camera lens and hold the mounted slide at the correct distance for focus. Mount the camera securely in front of a suitable light source (which could be daylight), then photograph the slide. Voila, instant digital conversion! Some post-processing will probably be needed, but that's often the case with scanned slides too.

I had one of those as well - it fixes on to the filter thread on the end of the lens, and was a car-boot bargain for a pound. I didn't get very good results from it - the cheapo Maplins scanner seems to be better. Of course, it might have been faulty, but I passed it on to someone on eBay and got good feedback, and there's not really much to go wrong. But it's another option, if you've got a DSLR kicking around and can find one.

Geoff_W

I have thousands of 35mm slides which I am slowly scanning. Many years ago I started with a PrimeFilm U1200 which did a reasonable job but only took one slide at a time and was very slow. More recently I tried a Neostar from T2 and a Maplin scanner as they offered higher resolution and slide carriers to speed up the process. Both were utterly useless, the main problem being inconsistent colour rendering; most scans had a severe magenta cast. In the end I bought an Epson Perfection V500 scanner and have been very impressed with the results, but there are a couple of caveats. Scanning is still painfully slow as the mask only holds 4 slides at a time. Plastic slides confuse the auto scanning system because the dark 'rivets' in the corners are detected as part of the picture - the solution is to make a template from a sheet of A4 white paper with cut-outs to match the exact size and position of the slides, then they scan perfectly. On the plus side, the scanner produces sharp, correct colour scans and is also capable of handling negatives, prints and larger formats.