My parents’ 50th anniversary is coming up, and as a gift I am getting (some of) their slides organized and scanned into a digital format. I’ve been looking around on-line and there are a lot of places that do this, but I’m at a loss in determining which one to go with.
Has anyone used a scanning service that they could recommend? I don’t have the skill, the equipment or the time to do it myself, and there aren’t any businesses locally that do this, so I’m looking for a reputable business that I can mail the slides to.
How many slides are you looking to have digitized? Many tabletop scanners now have the ability to scan 35mm slides. It’s an attachment or a slot on the lid. It may well be easier or cheaper to just do it yourself.
I just did a fast search on Best Buy’s website, using “Scanner” and “Slide” and Epson for under $95.
Precisely what I came here to say. I used to work for a photographer who did slide scanning, and we used an ordinary desktop scanner that did everything else as well, and cost less than $200 (a few years ago).
I have somewhere around 3000, but will probably only scan around 500 (that’s all I can afford).
I think I could probably handle basic scanning, but the editing would be very time-consuming. The pro’s use ICE to get rid of defects, orient the slides, crop blank edges, and do color correction for faded slides. I don’t think I could handle all that.
It’s that I’ve tried a number of places to compare, but I had some slides digitized by DigMyPics (http://www.digmypics.com/) and they did a reasonable job. I was kind of disappointed with the first samples, but after closer inspection of the source slides, I saw that they did a reasonable job.
Not professional grade, I think, but if you have decent source slides, they will do an acceptable job.
If you want to scan 500 slides that is a lot of work. Particularly if you are going to try to fix any of them. If they are faded evenly then you can bump that up pretty easy with any software that provides gamma correction. A surprisingly easy program to use was the old Microsoft Photo Editor that came with Windows (no longer included). If you have a version of Windows 98 you can snag the program.
Things to consider:
Slide scanners will have a higher resolution than flatbeds and are specifically designed for 35mm film. They will also have software designed to deal with negative film in case you need this function (remember, color negatives are vastly different than scanning photos). I would look at consumer guide articles that deal just with slide scanners. Things to look for are resolution and the ability to deal with dust. Since you’re dealing with a small image, dust becomes a major problem. Some of it can be deal with software but if it can be mechanically removed that would be a plus.
I played around with the flatbed scanner I have at home last night, just to see what kind of effort it took and what kind of quality I got. It’s a cheap scanner, but it has a slide holder.
My experiments confirmed to me that I need to have a professional do this. It took at least a few minutes for each slide, and the quality was not good at all - low resolution, poor color, and lots of defects.