Perhaps a long shot, but I’m looking to purchase one of these for my mother so that she can have convenient access to her many 35mm slides. Does anyone have any experience with what is good and what to avoid? Thanks in advance!

Don’t expect miracles, is all I can say.

I did a couple of thousand that my parents had had in storage since year dot with an Ion unit and the results are variable, to say the least.

Thank you, which one did you use? They seem to very hugely in price between about £50 and £2000, I’d like one that gives fairly decent results without costing a fortune if that is possible!!

Used a Canoscan (think it was an 8000f) to digitise my parents slides.

Results are pretty good although I’m sure they could be improved by playing around with settings.

Thanks, I’ve just had a look at the canon ones, was yours an integrated document and slide/film scanner or a slide/film only model?

It’s an integrated document/slide scanner.

I bought a Nikon Coolscan 4, (pretty sure about the 4) a few years ago, and got great results from it. Slide and neg only, up to 4000dpi, which IIRC is equivalent to a 25MP camera. Had prints blown up to A1, and you have to get within 6 inches to see the pixelation.

The dust and scratch removal software was fantastic, too. There were a couple of images/types of image when it wouldn’t play ball, but it saved a LOT of time touching up in PS.

That sounds ideal… I’ll have a look, was it super expensive?

The £50 scanners from Maplin etc are rubbish quality, best avoided.

I’ve now got a PlusTek OpticFilm scanner, cost about £200. It can do decent quality scans. It does have dust/scratch removal, which works pretty well. Though it is rather slow – if you have thousands of slides, it will take a long time to scan them all. Especially if you want to tweak each image.