HP says it is not designed to scan slides, but I would rather not buy another scanner just to scan in a few dozen slides, and I am not too keen on entrusting some 35 year old slides to Kinkos or whoever.
Has anyone had any luck jerry-rigging a flatbed scanner like this to input color slides?
Unless the scanner has a light source in the lid and is designed to scan transparencies, it will not do slides in any way you’d find acceptable.
I once managed to get almost usable images by placing a sheet of white tissue paper over the film, then laying a mirror on that. The results were pretty bad, and we wound up taking the film to a service bureau to be scanned properly. (It was a weird size large-format image and they charged about $50 to run it through a drum scanner. Expensive, but the scan was immaculate.)
Depending on how many slides you want to scan, it may be cost-effective to buy a scanner that will do slides for this project - the Canon CanoScan 4400F sells for about $90 at Amazon, for example, and you can batch-scan four slides at one pass.
If you had LOTS of slides, I’d point you at the Nikon CoolScan - for years, this line has been a “gold standard” for slide scanning - they start at about $600 and do nothing but 35mm slides amazingly well.