Has anyone had slides converted to DVD lately? Any recommendations? Is it safe to have them sent overseas where the labor rates are lower?
I send all my stuff (negatives, prints, and slides) to Scan Cafe (scancafe.com). You can choose to have them kept in the US or sent to India, I’ve always let them send everything overseas. Quality is excellent, and if you sign up for an account and just wait a bit they’ll send you a 40% off coupon in a week or so.
Do they do any edits?
I tried scanning my dad’s slides and got overwhelmed. Every slide I scanned came out dark. Photo shopping every image was a big undertaking.
I gave them back to dad.
I’ve wondered if the commercial labs lightened the images in a batch. Making them useable.
The other concern is getting them scrambled up. The slides are organized and stored in the carousels.
The company I worked with does basic color correction during scanning. They will also take carousels of slides, take the slides out for scanning, and put them back in order.
Awesome. 
I’ll definitely talk to Mom and see if she wants to mail these off.
Dad has at least 8 carousels.
I recently worked at a place that did this. We charged at least a dollar per slide, more if there was an order they had to be in. Each slide had to be checked individually for light level and focus. The result was a stack of images, which we could then put on DVD with a simple video-editing app.
Link expired.
Just type it in the bar. It’s being redirected for some reason.
Note that a video DVD is very low resolution. I would not recommend spending money to scan slides just to put them on a video DVD.
Data DVDs are a different story - you can save the images in whatever resolution you want.
I have a Canoscan 8800. I bought it specifically because it has the ability to scan transparencies. You remove the white platen backing and there’s a back-lighting strip to allow scanning of slides, negatives -colour or B&W- and - which is why I chose it - 120 film. the drivers are not the best, but it’s worked with Windows 7 and Windows 10 now. You can select the scan type - colour transparencies, negatives, B&W negative, etc. The downside - slides in cardboard carriers it can do only 4 at a time. (35mm Negative strips - 6 at a time) You can either tell the driver, for example, to figure out the negatives’ boundaries which it does fairly well usually, or manually set them. The latter was particularly useful for me because my father’s antique camera produced square(!) 35mm negatives which the driver did not handle. Also useful when scanning multiple small paper photos – you can designate multiple scan areas from the preview scan.
The key here is a backlighting system specifically intended to scan transparencies. Most more mid-level scanners that say they “scan transparencies” have backlighting o do so. BTW, my drivers allowed for tweaking the levels if the scan is somewhat dark. What impressed me was how bright and vivid Ektachrome slides were even 60 years later.
(BTW, I think I paid about $200 for the scanner about 10 years ago. I see it on Amazon still listed for about that. There’s a 9000 now too.)
Rather than convert to DVD, just have them scanned to .jpg images and then you can do whatever you want with them. Most modern DVD players have built-in slideshow capability, so all you have to do is create a DVD with all the .jpg images and the player will do the rest. Most modern TV’s can also create slideshows. All you have to do is copy the .jpg files to a USB and plug it into the back of the TV.
This thread should probably be in IMHO, but anyhow, about a year ago, The Wirecutter, a product review site owned by The New York Times, reviewed photo scanning services. The top-rated company was Memories Renewed, from Minneapolis.
It occurs to me too that nowadays, with a good camera, macro lens and tripod setup and home-made backlighting for a slide, you could take pictures of a slide using a regular interchangeable lens camera. As a bonus you end up with a macro lens. Over 10Mp should be more than enough resolution for any slide. (For negatives, construct a mask to prevent the backlight around the negative from blinding the camera.) To convert negative to positive, you should be able to do a bulk convert with many software programs.
And once you have a series of pictures, there are plenty of programs for producing slide shows with accompanying music…