Reasonably priced, high quality 35mm slide scanner?
Friend’s wide has a few thousand 35mm slides she wants to scan
Any suggestions appreciated.
High quality scanners are expensive. Older models are cheap but painful to use. Even the best are slow.
Unless someone wants a very time consuming hobby, send them off to a scanning service.
I recently purchase a Canon Canoscan 9000f, and found it to make high quality scans from 35mm slides as well as negatives in several formats. It can scan four slides at once, an comes with pretty good image processing software for retouching and dust removal. It is available for $169, so if you have more than a few dozen slides, it is cheaper than sending them out.
The friend has a few thousand slides. The problem is that after about 100 scans, boredom sets in. It’s expensive but sending to a service is really the way to go. (unless the slides are nudie pics)
You can find youtube videos about using your digital camera and various setups to digitize your slides.
I have the Epson V600. It will scan 35mm slides and negatives. It does a very good job. But yes, this will be a tedious job and if it only needs to be done once, I’d sure look at sending a few thousand slides out for scanning.
Here’s a good section from a serious photo supply shop
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/buy/Film-Scanners/ci/1151/N/4077634573
You’ll notice a second page - those are the 2 Hasselblad scanners at $13K and $20K
Looks like a claim of 7200dpi is as good as it gets in the under-$400 group, and there may be one that does batches.
I have about 100 slides and 100 B&W negatives (all 135) I need to scan.
Anybody want about 800 pounds of darkroom gear? 2 roller transport paper processors (Thermaphot!) included! D2 and D5 and 6x7 enlargers - all dichroic.
Perhaps this is a good time to cull the collection?
In my days with film I seemed to hold on to everything that wasn’t out of focus or over/underexposed. When I started scanning in my negatives I realized how much crap I was scanning along with good stuff.
Out of every roll there were probably only two or three keepers that were representative of the set. Nobody needs a picture of Mickey Mouse at Disney unless their family member is next to him.
Boy, the Disney haters are just everywhere… 
Yeah. Cull. And then send the boxes out to be professionally done. Make sure they’ll be blown off before scanning. Dust abounds, and will make subsequent printing of those favorite 20 or 30 images painful as hell.
Thanks for this thread. I was just looking at slide scanners this weekend, thinking maybe I’d get a bunch of dad’s old slides scanned and loaded onto digital picture frames as Xmas gifts for my family for next year.
What’s the going rate for slide conversion? Say I have 2,000 slides - what’s it going to cost me to get them all scanned?
I just had about 800 slides scanned. And I would also agree that if you have more than, say, 50, sending them off is the way to go.
The place I used was about .40 per scan, which isn’t the cheapest, but they did a decent job of cleaning off the dust and scanning. They also provide a service where you can preview your slides online, and can opt not to keep (and not get charged) for slides you don’t want. So you can do some culling after having sent them off. I think the limit is up to 20% of your order.
(I’m a little concerned about advertising for them, so PM me if you would like their name)
On one board, I encountered a fellow who estimated that he had 10,000 exposures on various chips.
It seems he just put in a new chip, shot until full, tossed full chip in box and loaded a new one.
No, he never looked at them, let alone edit or display them.
Scary
I probably have 3 images per 36 exp roll saved.
The shoe box of old snapshots is one thing; a shoebox of memory chips…
Brave new world…
.nm…
I have an Epson V370, which is pretty cheap and the results are reasonable: you can get much better for a lot more money or a lot worse for about the same money. It’s pretty slow though at about an hour for a roll of film. But the good thing is that the software takes care of pretty much everything, it’s really just loading the slides or film and then waiting for the scanning to happen, so you can do this while watching TV or something.
You may want to pay a little extra for a model that uses infrared light to remove dust from the scans, as physically removing the dust is rather challenging.
The trouble with slides and especially negatives is that it’s hard to judge whether they’re good enough to warrant scanning without scanning first…
There used to be these things called “light box” and “loupe” - together, then illuminated and enlarged even 135 to comfty viewing size.
See photo supply or ebay.
Cheap versions used to be about $10 each - for $20 each, you got small but acceptable for 135 box and a good 6x loupe.
Yep. I have a small portable lightbox (about 8"x10") and a loupe I’ve had forever. Both can be had for cheap.
If you have a small handful of carefully selected slides that you want really good scans of, look around for places that rent time on high end scanners. I did some film scans on one of those $20,000 Flextight beauties for something like $40 for an hour. I could have bought a cheap scanner for what I paid in studio time, but the cheap scanner would not give me images that would survive being printed at mural sizes.