[dDAPPete]

Without going broke any opinions on a good scanner for 35mm slides? I have many old slides going back 50 years that I want to store electronically.

Thanks

[slipe]

The Epson V500 or Canon 8800F are probably as cheap as you want to go. The V500 has true IR Digital Ice but the Canon FARE scratch and dust removal is almost as good and a lot faster. You will want scratch and dust removal for 50 year old slides.

The Epson V700 is better but a lot pricier. You can scan only 4 slides at a time with the cheaper flatbeds. Lower end dedicated film scanners require you to feed the slides one at a time. You get better results with the dedicated scanner if you don’t go too cheap. You would probably be out of your price range to get a film scanner with a slide feeder.

[legohead]

A typical service online (and perhaps in your area- search google maps) will charge 35 cents per slide. At least that's what www.thedigitalconvert.com has listed after my quick search in Chicago. So 1,000 slides would be $350. You spend zero time doing work and you'll probably get a better job done. Flatbed scanners make sense for casual use. For large jobs, it's not worth the time or effort.

The Epson V700 costs about $500 and does a super job. But I can tell you from much experience that it is not very fast. And if you're planning on turning on the native dust removal you really can forget about it. As for the third-party built-in Digital ICE - it's so slow it's practically useless. Not to mention it overcompensates and terribly messes up your scans. I vote 2 thumbs down for flatbed Digital ICE. Seriously. The native dust removal is fine but slows things down some.

With all features off, it will take almost of week of scanning FULL-TIME to get through those thousand slides with a flatbed. Not to mention the time you'll need to learn and get comfortable enough with the equipment to move fast. And the V700 is probably your best bet in flatbed as it can do 12 at a time. The high-model Canon can do 12 as well although my trust has always been with Epson.

The Nikon scanners most people use for this are out of the typical person's budget at about $1,500 with the 50 slide feeder attachment. Those aren't trouble-free either. And with regard to dust removal, personally i'd rather apply it myself in software than let the scanner overdo it on all my pictures and ruin ALL my scans.

[slipe]

35c per slide is indeed reasonable compared to scanning them yourself. People have usually found local prices to be much higher – like over a dollar per slide. I would be a little reluctant to ship off my lifetime collection, but I would guess the odds of losing them is quite low. Your link timed out so I have no idea of the resolution.

Digital Ice works fine for me, but most of my scanning is film. I understand it works well for slides as well except for Kodachrome. Not sure whether the triple layer causes problems with Canon’s FARE as well.

I wish Canon had their high end flatbed still available. I bought an Epson V500 last year to carry me over until Canon releases another top end scanner. The 9950 had a larger bed and scanned more film and slides than the V700. But it has been probably two years since they had anything that would scan more than 4 slides at once.

Time isn’t that big a factor if you can scan a lot at once. It isn’t like you have to sit and watch it scan. The time spent is really the time it takes to set up the scan and take the slides back out. If you have enough RAM it doesn’t even interrupt your normal computer use.

[legohead]

the link works for me - it says 1500 dpi (3 megapixel) for 0.35 or 2400 dpi (6 megapixel) for 0.39. number is 773-295-1760. they do have discounts on quantity. larger resolutions probably aren't necessary unless you are needing to make printouts beyond 8x10.

in any case, there are numerous places online with similar prices and as long as you manage to get your photos to them, you shouldn't have to worry about them on the way back. Once they're scanned, you can always get reprints or another CD/DVD of the scans. And if the shipment were insured you wouldn't have to pay for any of it.

you know, when you bring your pictures to Walgreens for next-day service they send your pictures out to Qualex for printing. So it's really the same thing. Your better off packaging it on your own and insuring it. For safety, you just wouldn't [and certainly shouldn't] bring 50 rolls of film at once to Walgreens. Likewise, there's no reason why you'd have to mail out all your slides/photos at once. you could always do it in parts and ask if they'd apply a quantity discount if you do them all in a month or so as separate orders or something.

Maybe I'll ask Epson why my V700 digital ice is always messing up my scans. thanks. it's good epson's correction works. the ice though is way too slow to use for large projects. that's for sure.

[legohead]

true. you don't have to watch the scanning, but if you aren't there when it's done with each batch of 12 you'll fall way behind in time. it's not so bad, but it's frustrating to look at a big pile of slides that never seems to get smaller. 12 at a time is pretty slow still.

the 11x17 epsons can do 15 at a time but they'll pinch your pocketbook. before getting my epson, i tried an older UMAX SCSI scanner off eBay but it was broken and i figured i'd rather not deal with old technology.

UMAX has a 11x17 flatbed (from 2001) that can do 32 slides at a time. i'm not sure about the resolution though. it says the scanner does 800x1600 and 9600 interpolated. i'm not sure if that applies to the transparency adapter as well. 800x1600 is way too little for photo slides.
http://umax.com/scanners/index.jsp?c...specifications

then there are the way too expensive OCE flatbeds (many thousands) with a 18x24 surface that are supposedly really fast and very high resolution.