Came back from my folks last week with a kodak carousel (god how I envied that in my art school days) and a small mountain of slides of my childhood and my parents photos going back to their honeymoon.

Want to digitise them so that we can share them around the family a bit. My current scanner doesn’t have a back-light for transparencies and I aways had mixed results scanning from slides on flatbeds in the past, usually having to pop the transparency out of its case, risking damage to them. Don’t want to do that hundreds of times.

I’ve come across little self contained slide scanners in the past – are they any good? Not really looking to spend more than a couple of hundred quid on one. Something that can do slides and negs would be good, and which gives a reasonably quick workflow, as I’m monumentally lazy.

A similar question cropped up a couple of weeks ago, might help. Hang on.

Here.

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/photography-question-negatives-to-digital-whats-the-best-way

Cheers C – I’ll have a read of that

That Veho slide “scanner” that Cougar links to on the thread he links to looks exactly like the Ion Slides2PC device I got from Costco for about £50 on an impulse. I’ve found it very disappointing. It isn’t really a scanner as such, it takes a relatively low-res photo of the slide and consequently the results are similar to what you get if you project the slide onto a screen and then take a photo of the screen. On the other hand it’s a lot more convenient than a flat bed scanner if you don’t mind about quality!

I wondered if that was the case with the cheaper ones I’m seeing on ebay. I’ve got an older laptop spare I can run older OSX on so I’m going to see if I can pick up a second hand nikon one, use it then sell it on. Might be a bit of slooooow process with USB1 though

actually. In the old days, when there were ‘things’, people used slide duplicating lenses. Could I fit something to a canon eos?

I’ve found it very disappointing.

TBH,

I’ve never used it in anger, I bought it for a project that I never got around to doing, but my initial impressions weren’t exactly stellar either.

Apparently they’re a lot better with the newer drivers; I’ve not tried it since I updated it though.

I bought an Epson V500 flatbed scanner to scan old slide / negatives. I tried years ago with a flatbed and found cleaning up the dust too much effort to make bulk scanning possible. The V500 has IR dust removal built in, and it works much better. It will do multiple scans in one pass of either slides or negatives. It will also do medium format and 120 film.

An example of 50 year old 35mm negative scan, which is covered in dust….

img145.jpg by Lodious, on Flickr

I don’t know how good the quality of the negative is (it’s prob taken with a cheap camera), but the quality looks good enough for me.

Liking that Lodious, didn’t you need to take the slides out of their frames?

Good scan, Lodious. A tad soft, could do with a little bit of unsharp mask, but the scan is fairly small, so you’d have to be fairly judiscious in using it. If you’re using something like Elements then it could be possible to set up an action to batch process the scans once done. I’d do the scans bigger if it were me, somewhere around 30cm across at 300dpi.
I’ve never used one of the little slide/neg scanners, only a flatbed Epson, and, prior to that a Crosfield 6250 drum scanner. Great results, but the 65k cost is a bit prohibitive…
The Epson gave pretty good results, but it did have a proper hood backlight, and a good slide/neg mount as well; it did produce very good results, good enough for repro, if you know how to set up and do the appropriate post-production work in Photoshop.

I think that one was from a negative, but I did some slides, and didn’t take them out of the frames. TBH, I didn’t even scan the correct side of the negatives, so I didn’t have to flip the image, and I didn’t use the highest resolution to save time / disk space, so the quality could have been better.

The image has been resampled for flickr, so there is some quality loss there. For what I wanted (i.e. scan a couple of hundred slides/negatives, most of which are pretty poor quality) the V500 has done the job. Pretty pleased with it TBH.

pay someone to do it.
By far the best option in my opinion.

I paid a local camera shop (Bass & Bligh in Harrogate) I think I only had about 50 out of ‘loads’ that I wanted to copy. I was happy with the results
Reckon you need to work out how much It’s gonna cost for to pay someone or buy the equipment to do it yourself, & is it a one off job?