Do people still use slide projectors?

My dad once told me that, when he was a kid, and someone first bought the new album by the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, or whoever, all the guys would go over to that guy’s house and they’d all listen to the record together. It blew my mind to imagine something like that, as the situation with music today is so incredibly different - now everyone gets every song they want in a few seconds on the computer. But back then, a communal listening session was built upon the physical acquisition of the media.

It occurred to me that the same thing is true of photos. In the great movie Coming Home, which was made in 1978, Jon Voight’s character shows Jane Fonda and her friend his photos from Vietnam - by projecting them onto the wall with a slide projector, one at a time, and explaining each one. This concept also blows my mind - today, photos are posted up online, where many people can view them, but individually rather than as a group with the person who took the photos. And on a small screen, not on a wall-sized image.

What a huge difference this makes. Does anyone still use those slide projectors? Is photo-viewing still a social event for anyone?

Mechanical carousel slide projectors aren’t too common these days, but I’ve seen several photo presentations that were displayed using computer projectors and stuff like PowerPoint.

Yeah, but do people ever do that as a spontaneous social thing, like at someone’s house, at a gathering? I feel like “normal” people never own those digital-projector devices, they’re only used in college classrooms and business conference rooms.

I thought those tiny “pico projectors” (example) were intended for this type of use? Though I don’t personally know anyone who owns one.

But yo can just bring up a slideshow on your monitor, scroll through, and talk about relevant photos. My family does this all the time after vacations.

Of course, my dad was one of those with a big mechanical slide projector back in the day, so maybe it’s just in my blood.

Never mind the monitor, every DVD player I have ever seen will play picture disks as a slideshow. That was how all my friends and family have been giving slideshow for the past half decade or so. Just burn a VCD slideshow. Most newer TVs will run slideshows straight off a USB drive, which is how I gave my last one.

In my experience slideshows are much *more *popular now than they ever were in the past, precisely because you don’t need the slide projector. I went to about 3 non-work slideshows in my entire life prior to the last decade, and have been to at least 10 in the last 10 years. It’s pretty much standard in my circle that when someone goes somewhere they take lots of photos then we sit around and watch them on the TV when they get back.

We occasionally do “slide shows” of digital picture photo rolls from vacations or events, displayed from computer, PS3, TiVo, etc. onto a big central TV everyone watches while we talk about the pictures. It can sometimes be more fun in that format rather than passing around packs of small photos, or displaying on a tablet/laptop.

I still own and use a slide projector. There are a number of reasons why they remain special.
The image is big, bright, and has vastly higher resolution than any digital technology screen you can afford.

For me, this is slightly cheating as I have been a medium format enthusiast for decades. So I have a medium format (645 - which means the film uses an area 56mm x 42mm) and a slide projector for that format. So the images that are projected are really very very nice.

OTOH, it is pain to get out and set up. The film costs a bomb - it costs me about $4 an image by the time the a selected image is mounted for projection, and it costs $2 each time I hit the shutter, even if the image is a dud. So although I still have all the gear, it doesn’t get the use it once did. If I travel I will take a medium format camera, and there will be a family showing of projected photographs. I will usually scan a few really good pictures which will wend their way around the global in digital form, at vastly reduced resolution.

There is still a hard core of medium format photographers. But it is a serious hobby. 35mm film photography has suffered harder at the hands of digital. The lack of affordable high resolution digital projection devices is a pity. If 4k video ever makes it, it might provide something akin to the experience of projected film. A a casual mechanism for general photography, indeed, slide projectors are dead.

Heck, slide shows from film were such a cool event, I almost think of them in the same fondness as I have for the days of drive-in movies. :slight_smile:

The last slide party I had was probably 1997 or so. My hiking group used to do multi-day backpack trips and everyone shot film slide format, digital was not really advanced enough. Get together, some background tunes, munchies and drinks, and lots of oooing and ahhhing at the big screen. I remember earlier when after a dinner party, it was normal for someone to drag out a projector and show slides from Japan or something. Good times! [/old fart]

YES! Well not to take pics, but this weekend we were looking through old slides on a slide projector. We set up a sheet for a screen, loaded the carousel and lights camera action! oldies from the 50’s and 60’s - :cool:

I remember back in the day working on what was known as multi-media presentations. We would have anywhere from 2-6 Carousel slide projectors, and occasionally a 16mm movie projector all synchronized and controlled by inaudible signals on the audio soundtrack tape. These things would take weeks to produce, and hours to set up the projectors to get them all aligned and registered properly with each other.

The presentations were very impressive, with slides fading in and out, superimposing on each other, and lots of special effects were possible, if a little difficult to produce. Now you can do the same thing with PowerPoint in a fraction of the time.

I have two slide projectors–my first one (that I inherited from my grandfather) was sort of broken, so I got another of the same model on ebay for cheap (it was broken, too, but in a different way) and one of these days I’m going to use it to fix the old one. I also have a projector screen. I have a stack of boxes full of family slides that is probably 4-5 feet tall. I’m the caretaker of the family slides, you see.

I haven’t actually looked at any of the family slides in over a decade, however.

That said, when I was in art school, we had to make a portfolio which included providing slides of our work. Many/(most if you believed the professor) graduate programs expect you to submit a portfolio in slide format, apparently. I know that Yale requires it, for example. So that’s one area that still uses slides.

There are services that will let you upload your digital images to them and they’ll mail you slides of the images. It’s generally less than $2/slide. The benefit even beyond the cost is that you only pay for slides of the images that came out well, and it allows for some cleanup/manipulation in Photoshop or similar before committing to film. I forget the name of the company that did my slides when I made my portfolio, but I know it was out of Arizona somewhere. Looking on Google it seems there are several companies that do this, and the pricing appears to be competitive.

I still have a Kodak carousel projector, 52 carousels of 140 slides each. Some where north of 5500 slides and even have 2 spare bulbs for the projector.

Also have a Sony TC-500 reel to reel tape deck that works just fine… 1964

1939-40 Sewing machine that I use on leather and camping stuff given to me by my mother.

I gots lots of old stuff that I still use and works just fine…

Do classrooms still use filmstrips?

Of course. I get together with friends about five times a year for such viewings. We look at mostly old stuff using the Carousel and mostly new stuff using the digital projector. But two of the guys still shoot slide film.

I still shoot 35mm slides and own a projector, but I haven’t had anyone to project them for in a while. I’m running out of places to develop them, though. Calumet doesn’t anymore, so they sent me to a place near South Station. I’ve got a scanner, so once they’re developed I can digitize them and send to anyone I want to share them with. I’m thinking of making the jump to full digital in the near future.

Oh God. We’ve got enough boxes of slide carosels to furnish a house. In fact, I’ve threatened to do just that. Make a sofa-sized pile, throw a cover over it…

Viewing slides was a huge production. We haven’t done it in years.

We’ve got a treasure trove of family pictures on slides. I bought Hubster a gizmo to digitize the slides, and since he’s retired, I’ve been hoping (HOPING!) he’d take care of that chore.

One day, maybe.
~VOW

AFAIK, my mother still has storage chests filled with thousands of slides from bygone family vacations and whatever else my father or grandfather shot.

All this talk of “pico” video projectors and Powerpoint with images brutally hacked down to “high-definition” resolution makes me sad - if you’ve never seen actual Kodachrome slides (25 ASA, with virtually no grain whatsoever), you have no idea what you’re missing. And you really haven’t experienced the glory of film until you’ve seen 4x5 inch chromes. You can just about walk into those images.

Today, watching someone’s “slide show” on a computer is like watching something on TV. It’s available at the click of a mouse. Doing a slide show with actual slides was a production. You had to get the screen out of the closet and set it up, set the projector on something, aim it, focus it, turn out the lights, and the communal experience along with the noise of the projector and the smell of dust on the bulb mixed together for something that just can’t be duplicated in video.

I still have my family’s slide projector and the slides. The pictures only cover a few years’ time, most taken when my parents lived in France and my sisters and I were very young. We watched them last Christmas to much interest. I thinkthat it is not much different than watching a powerpoint presentation, except the images are so beautiful and fascinating (to us.).

To address another point in the OP, the communal listening to an album was also a function of money. How were you going to know if you wanted to plunk down your hard-earned cash for a record you’d never heard?

I know a theater that would show stills of photos before the main event. They were all silly photos.