Saving slides

Boatworker

Hope this is the right forum for this.

Does anyone have a suggestion as to a good machine to convert 35mm slides to CD's. My mom must have thousands of them from when we were growing up.


Thanks,
Jim

ziggy53

Jim,

The best quality comes from a slide/film scanner. While these used to be pretty common the choices are getting slimmer now.

We had a previous discussion here:

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=40780
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=44738
http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=75713

Note in the last link the suggestion for the Epson V700/V750 flatbed scanners, which appear to work pretty well with the addition of a third-party holder. (I'm not sure if slides would require a custom holder or not.)

For thousands of slides the very first thing I would do is sort down to just those that deserve scanning. Considering the time it takes to scan it will turn an impossible job into a passable project.

Boatworker

Ziggy,

Thanks for the links. I guess I should have searched the entire site instead of just this forum.

That V700 looks like it would do the trick although this is going to take some time. Probably going to have to invest in an external HD too.

Jim

edknight

This outfit got a good writeup in either Pop Photography or Outdoor Photography (Sorry about the aging memory).

http://www.scancafe.com

They do 3000 dpi scans for ~$ 0.25. The company ships your slides to India for lower labor cost. They give you a $1,000 shipping guarantee, returning slides and DVD's. I've an Indian friend in similar situation as you; he is planning to use their service after talking with the company. Turns out he went to College in the same town where they do the scanning (Bangalore, I think).

I've scanned a couple thousand slides on a dedicated film scanner (Milonta Dimage 5400) and, while the quality is excellent, the scanning and processing are VERY time consuming. The Epson flatbed would be much faster, though quality will likely suffer.