I bought a Canon Scanjet 8800 - IIRC, about $200 Canadian - about 5 years ago or more. This will do almost any scanning you want. It scans up to legal size paper, and comes with 3 inserts - for 35mm, 120 (2-1/4") negatives, and slides in cardboard frames. Works great. I spent a few months off and on scanning my dad’s photo repository. (some were so old, the negatives on 35mm film were square).
The Ektachrome slides from the 1950’s were still vibrant and clean colours. I have a very nice colour picture of my brother and myself looking out over Yosemite about 1957 - plus one of us sitting on the front porch hugging our Mister Golliwogs… Those were the days…
It takes a bit of fiddling with the driver software to get the exact settings - especially when I was scanning 35mm negatives of a non-standard size. Typically I scanned 2000dpi, since that was about the limit of quality and sharpness of the negatives. (Beyond that, all I got was good grain definition of the silver crystals.) It will scan 4 slides or two 5-negative strips. In that case, I had to manually indicate the shapes of the non-standard negatives by drawing a crop box around each one - then it would take about 20 minutes to scan 10 images.
Decent? My Canon V600 produces excellent results scanning negatives and it was around $200. What’s your requirement for “decent”?
I’m not sure but it used to be that people would drop their film off and pick up slides and not think too much about what happened in between or how they made the slides. Not all slide shooters were serious photographers.
Well, I mean, I didn’t either before I got into photography in my late teens, but when I shot a roll of film, and got the developed roll of film back (whether it be negatives or positives/slides), I mean, I knew that was the original image. Certainly people realized that the film they were getting back was the same film they were submitting, no? (ETA: I guess there could be some confusion with slides, since they typically come mounted individually, but I guess it never occurred to me to think it was anything but the film I dropped off cut up into individual frames and mounted. Maybe it’s because I’ve taken them apart as a kid and saw the little numbers and markings on the edges that looked just like what you’d get on negatives.)
I lay the slide on a back lit ground glass plate and snap a photo with a digital camera. Works for black and white negatives too. Just invert in Photoshop.
Not perfect but it gives you an immediate result. Main problem so far is dirt on the slides and deterioration of some that were not protected.
This or the slide-copying holder mentioned by Pulykamell - this is assuming you have the decent camera equipment to get reasonable quality pictures out the process.
I saw a Polaroid one on Amazon also - the common complaint was needing extra pieces to fit to your lens, needing the right size lens. The Nikon one for example, the customer reviews did not mention any problem like the polaroid’s color fringing due to a crappy internal lens. The two adaptors I looked up basically attach to the front of your lens, i.e. 52mm filter thread I think. The Nikon one wants extension tubes too, to make primary lenses act as close-up lenses. So you need something better than an iPhone or snapshot camera.
I repeat my warning from several previous threads: if you don’t already have one - buy a USB drive. (1TB is CHEAP). Back up all photos and any other documents, while you are at it, to this drive. Then UNPLUG it and set it aside. Update every so often. Once your photo collection becomes large and precious, it’s common sense.
You’d be amazed how many random people are getting hit with nasty ransomware viruses - which basically go through your computer - and any network shares with read-write - and re-write all usable files to junk unless you send them money for the decryption key. This includes JPG, DOC, XLS spreadsheet, PDF, and whatever else occurs to them as data files you might want.
You are also protected against hard drive failure. Plus, if you store the drive away from your computer, you are also better protected against theft, fire.