When I was a kid and we took road trip vacations my dad took a LOT of pictures. Most often these were on slides, to be shown to others later.
Can slides be transferred onto CD’s? I don’t care about the cost, if it’s possible. I wouldn’t be copying all of them anyway, just the best ones with family shown.
It’s basically just a scanning process, then burning the files to a CD.
There are lots of gadgets like this to make the process easy.
Slides copy well, if you’ve the means to project them and digitize properly, better than prints
No so sure about simply scanning one
You wouldn’t want to just scan one with a regular paper scanner. They make image scanners specifically for slides, though. That is what kunilou was referring to.
There used to be fairly common services available that could scan the slides for you and convert them into a digital format. Now that dedicated slide scanners are cheap and readily available, I’m not sure how many of those services still exist.
If you do a search for slide conversion you ought to be able to find something that works for your project. There are plenty of vendors out there.
I too have many family slides, going back to the 1940s, that I need to convert (after serious culling, there are about 12,000 of them!). I bought a PowerSlide 5000 about 5 years ago, and the conversion has been a slow process in the background. Sometimes I am tempted to say the heck with it and go with one of the services, at least for some of the shots.
I’ve used scancafe.com - good service and reasonable price.
Yes, Scan Cafe
It has been my choice for several years now. Don’t bother with the pro options, you likely won’t find a use for the extra in that service. The basic scan package is very, very good. If they have the options for dust removal and color correction in the package you’re looking at, I recommend it.
They can also do negatives, prints (if you don’t have the original negs or chromes), and film to video transfer.
They send it out to their remote labs (India), so it takes some time. One of my orders took about 8 weeks total. They also have local (USA) labs for faster turn around, but at extra cost.
Sign up for their e-mails and you’ll get sales offers that sometimes are 60-70% off. I think intro pricing gets you 50% off. You can always send their e-mails to spam later if unsubscribing doesn’t work.
Thus ends my commercial for them!
When you’re done, I would love to see some. PM me your contact info and I’ll e-mail some samples of stuff I’ve had done by them. (You remember me as NoClueBoy, btw)
Yes, Scan Cafe
It has been my choice for several years now. Don’t bother with the pro options, you likely won’t find a use for the extra in that service. The basic scan package is very, very good. If they have the options for dust removal and color correction in the package you’re looking at, I recommend it.
They can also do negatives, prints (if you don’t have the original negs or chromes), and film to video transfer.
They send it out to their remote labs (India), so it takes some time. One of my orders took about 8 weeks total. They also have local (USA) labs for faster turn around, but at extra cost.
Sign up for their e-mails and you’ll get sales offers that sometimes are 60-70% off. I think intro pricing gets you 50% off. You can always send their e-mails to spam later if unsubscribing doesn’t work.
Thus ends my commercial for them!
When you’re done, I would love to see some. PM me your contact info and I’ll e-mail some samples of stuff I’ve had done by them. (You remember me as NoClueBoy, btw)
Wow! Just like the old days!
Let me guess, you always ordered double prints?
Last I looked, a decent film scanner (35mm, 2 1/4) started at $40,000.
If you are in a moderate-or-larger size town, there are probably local operations which have proper equipment and are much easier to deal with.
old cameras often had one lens - if your desired image fills only part of the slide, they will offer a cropping option so you don’t end up with the same lesser image.
You will find the output options a JPEG and RAW - RAW is used for professional image manipulation.
I’m in a similar situation - I have about 2000 slides that my dad took back in the 60s and 70s. Vacations, family gatherings, etc. My mom bought a cheap slide scanner at Kohl’s a few years ago and I started trying to scan some of the slides, but the scanner and software were crap so I gave up. I’ve thought about buying myself a better slide scanner but given the effort involved to scan a couple thousand slides, it might be worth it to have someone else do it.
Baker, have you checked with Wolfe’s camera shop in Topeka? It looks like they have a slide scanning service. http://wolfesprints.com/scanning-negatives.html
If you don’t care about the 2 1/4 part (I don’t know anything about those scanners), a good dedicated film scanner can be found for around $500 or less. I have a Nikon LS-50, which I last used probably a dozen years ago. The problem is these things are fairly time consuming, so I’d much rather send it out to a service if I’m doing a bunch.
Truth is, these days, I don’t even use that film scanner. I use one of my digital cameras, a macro lens, and a slide copying adaptor. Works a charm and much faster than the scanner, but requires a bit more equipment and a little know-how in setting things up.
Well, it looks like those went up in price, or the Amazon prices are just weird. A new LS-50 will cost you $2000, according to the sellers at Amazon. I got mine for $500 back then. Looks like eBay has more reasonable prices, at $500 or less used, which is about right (in my opinion) for the LS-50/Coolscan V. And if you want a good one that could do 2 1/4, the Nikon Coolscan 8000 will run you around $750. (This is the one my medium format shooting friend used. I totally forgot about it.) You certainly do not need to pay $40K for a quality dedicated 35mm & 120 film scanner.
Still, I recommend sending it out to a service, unless you really want to do it yourself for some reason. (You definitely have much more control over quality if you do it yourself, but it’s slow and a pain-in-the-ass and I’d only recommend it if you have exacting standards.)
QFT
I spent a few months scanning my dad’s old slides and they came out well. It is time consuming, but I did it while watching movies and listening to podcasts. It’s do-able.
A slide is the pure, original exposed and ‘developed’ image (photo) in its original size.
Whenever I point this out, people are surprised.
I guess I’ve been a photographer for so long, I don’t even know what else people think it would be. What do they think a slide is?
Now days? either a powerpoint frame, or they have absolutely no clue.
Honestly, I was thinking he was talking about old pics of kids on sliding boards until I read a bit further.
Carry on.