My late father was a prodigious photographer. Many of the pictures that he took when I was a kid were produced as 35mm slides. After he passed, my siblings and I went through the plethora of slides and removed duplicates and other slides that we deemed not worth saving. But we still have over a thousand slides that are sitting in their original boxes or slide carousels.
I would like to digitize these slides, but I don’t know the best way to do so. A quick Google search reveals that there are a number of devices available to do this, as well as services that will do the job. But I have no idea which is the best way to go, or the best appliance to purchase.
Have any Dopers gone through this exercise? Any ideas or recommendations? Any suggestions would be welcome. Thanks in advance!
Go with a service. Digitizing slides is a HUGE time sink.
I used scancafe.com but there are plenty of other options out there. It really pays to organize your slides into groups, since you’re files will come back based on your organization. If you can sort them by year, subject, or category it will help you in the long run.
You can get this done atCVS.29.99 for the first 30 images, and then .49 per image after that is a pretty good deal. A quality device to do this will save you money, but you have to be good at photo editing to make sure they’ll turn out well. Still, I’ve heard doing it yourself will cost less than the $500+ you’d be looking at.
Another suggestion to use a service like ScanCafe, which also includes basic corrections. It’s a huge time sink to scan lots of slides, and I say this as someone with a high end film scanner.
Even if you can find a scanner that will work at a price you can justify paying, getting someone to do it for you will save you from then having to deal with a scanner you don’t need any more.
There are a lot of services that do this, which I would recommend.
I have a good Epson scanner that scans slides. You can can get very good results for under $200 but it scans 4-5 at once and takes a few minutes for each batch. So 1000 slides might take you 16 hours.
I bought a cheap scanner to digitize the slides I wanted to keep, but I was ruthless in selecting them. I’m retired also but trust me, even that was a pain in the neck. It would have gone faster with a more expensive scanner, but unless you want to reminisce about each slide as you do it, a service is going to be better.
If you’re willing to spend the time, go for it. Just spend the time to clean and prepare the slides before scanning, otherwise you’ll be disappointed in your results.
There are cheap slide/negative scanners like this, they are basically special-purpose digital cameras. I don’t have any experience with them but the specs aren’t great. Also, they don’t detect and remove dust, which is a major issue when scanning slides.
There used to be high-end slide scanners available, like this Nikon. They have very high resolution, and more importantly, they have infrared sensors that detect dust. Major brands like Nikon don’t seem to make prosumer-grade slide scanners anymore, but this Plustek scanner may be a decent alternative. I have no experience myself.
Then there are hybrid scanners that are basically flatbed scanners, but with a light source built into the lid to allow scanning of transparencies (slides and negatives). They are nice because they can also scan prints, and some are quite affordable. And some of them actually have the infrared dust detection. Epson makes several models (like the Perfection V600). I have a Canon CanoScan 9000F MKII which I like a lot, but I bought it when it was in production and cost $175; now it seems to be out of production and Amazon is selling it for $770. It’s available on eBay for much less but if you go that route, make sure the slide holder is included.
I have a V800 Perfection. It is a bed scanner (no autofeed) and has bracket adapters for 35mm film and other sizes. You can also scan mounted slides but it takes a little effort to get them lined up right–the brackets are designed for naked film.
The software includes an option to do automatic clean-up of things like dust but you should blow the dust of the slides if they have not been kept in a dust-free container. I would avoid canned air because sometimes they can blow out propellant. I have an air bulb for my SLR that is good for this.
I have gotten good results right off the scanner, although have used PhotoShop Elements to tweak things if there are exposure or other technical problems.
It is an all-purpose scanner that also does reflective material. I have not shopped for them but I bet there are scanners that are specifically set up to scan mounted slides. It would be worth comparing.
I have a Nikon Cool Scan LS-50 lying around (which I see now is selling for $1.5K-$2K, wtf? I bought it for $500 back in the early-mid-2000s, maybe time to sell mine, as I haven’t used it in probably a decade.) You’re right–it’s great for scanning color film and slides because it does have dust and scratch detection (Nikon calls theirs “Digital ICE technology”) but it doesn’t do anything for black and white film (though if you’re scanning slides, it’s almost certainly color slide, as black and white transparency/slide films were not common.) Thing is, it is pretty slow. You can buy a feeder for it, but I remember it being something around a minute to two per slide (depending on whether you used ICE noise detection or not.) Very, very tedious for large volumes, but it did produce a very good results.
When my dad asked me to digitize his photos from Vietnam a few years ago, I just sent them out, as it wasn’t worth my time. The quality of my scans would have been much better, but I would have gone nuts doing it. I would explore the flatbed scanning options and see where the technology is these days in terms of quality. That may be a reasonable DIY option now, but when I was doing scanning years ago, I didn’t feel the quality was good enough (at least for me. It may be fine for a lot of people.)
I had a bunch of slides digitized in the early 2000s, so this may not be needed. Still might be a good idea -
Make sure all the slides are facing the same direction, and have the proper orientation. When I had mine digitized, they just loaded the slides into a machine without checking.
Some of the results just needed to be rotated, but some of the slides that were backward were out of focus, because the film was slightly bowed.
Of course, this might not affect you. I had never organized those slides to be viewed with a slide viewer.
I had one much like that. I didn’t have major quality issues, but my slides were fairly well protected before I scanned them. But I would not recommend it for any significant number of slides. Too much of a pain and way too slow.
This isn’t really a factual question. I could bump it over to IMHO, but given that the subject matter is (at least in some sense) artistic, I think that CS is probably a better fit. Moving.
I used a high grade scanner at a library. You might check and see if any local branches have one.
There are cheap scanners out there, but the ones I’ve tried gave mediocre results. Worst was one of those flatbeds (a Hewlett-Packard) that came with a light source, but that was years ago - maybe they’ve improved.
Here’s something I recommend, that will drive some folks crazy. If your slides are dusty (and old slides that have been projected probably are), wash them! You heard me. I took a bunch of slides in their cardboard mounts, dipped each one in water with some detergent, scrubbed the film front and back with a small soft camel hair paintbrush, dipped it in clean water, and stuck it into a slide carousel to dry. No ill effects, the cardboard didn’t fall apart, and some very dirty slides were greatly improved. Try it on a few junk slides if it worries you.
Washing slides in a cleaning fluid is perfectly fine and common, but I’ve always heard that you must use a non-water based cleaning liquid. This page, for example, says naphtha or pure alcohol are OK. (Not “rubbing alcohol” because that contains a lot of water.)
Yes, you’ve always heard that, but think of this - what do processing labs use to rinse out the chemicals? Water. It can’t hurt film. It will soften the emulsion temporarily, but that’s why you use a soft brush to scrub it. (I would add to the above recipe: put a drop of Photo-Flo in the rinse water, to prevent spots.)