Photographers, I am considering a slide digital converter for an Xmas gift for my sister. She’s a hobbyist photographer, and we have a bunch of slides and things from our childhood that I think she would like to save digitally. But I don’t know anything about these things. Are they even a good idea? How do you shop for one? How much should one cost? Is there a brand or model you’d recommend?
The only ones worthwhile for serious work are quite expensive. The cheapest decent quality slide scanner is around $700. Epson makes flatbed scanners that do a reasonable job at scanning slides. Those can be in the few-hundred-dollar range.
There’s one on woot.com right now for $39.99. Don’t know about the quality, but for that price how could you go wrong? If you’re not familiar with woot, it is one item for one day or until it sells out, so I’d recommend you check it out asap if you’re interested. Oh–I’m not a photographer by any means but I just saw the item a couple of minutes ago and wow–what a coincidence seeing your post!
Actually, I saw that too and that’s what inspired my post. On the one hand, clearly you can get them cheaply. But I don’t know if that’s a good thing, and I don’t want to give my sister some piece of (possibly) barely useable crap. The thing is, I don’t know if a 39.99 converter is barely useable crap!
I’ve read a lot of negative things about the one currently featured on Woot.com.
On the other hand, I’ve ready many, many glowing reports on the Canon CanoScan 4400F, and it isn’t horribly expensive (though maybe outside “gift” level pricing).
My SO and I bought one about a year ago. Between our families, there are several thousand slides around.
When we started looking, we asked ourselves: What do we want?
Do we want to scan a few of the better slides? This would mean we would have to go through all of them before hand, to sort out the ones we want.
Do we want to scan all of them? That would mean lots of time scanning, but not the time to sort before hand.
We decided to go the scan them all route. So our priorities were 1: decent images 2: automation 3: price
We finally settled on the Powerslide 3650. It’s slightly over $800, does 3600x3600 resolution and will handle 50 slides at a time, or 100 if you get a tray for it. We figure if we have a few pictures that we decide later we want at a higher resolution, we will pay someone to rescan that handful.
As for the one on Woot? It’s got low resolution and will only do one slide at a time. If that fits what you need, the price is good.
If you have a few more, then a flat bed scanner which will scan 3 or 4 at a time would have been our choice.
To help justify the cost for us, we are planning on loaning the scanner out to our friends, when we are done. A number of them are in the same boat.
I have an Epson Perfection 4870 (availble used and on eBay) that can scan 24 slides at a time. It works great, but it’s a big pain loading the slides into the carrier, scanning, unloading the slides, reloading another set of slides…if you have a lot of slides, it turns into a major project.
I have the Plustek OpticFilm 7200 7200DPI Film Scanner and am using it to scan all the old family photos, and so far I have no complaints, although it does work one at a time, and it with the volume I am doing, it would be nice to have a bigger capacity.
Just read Tastes of Chocolate post again.
Once you find the machine you want, look for a used one. People buy these things, scan all their slides and then sell the machine as they don’t intend to shoot slides again.
There are places that you can send your slides to and they will scan them for you.