Scanning Slides

Going through my Dad’s effects I’ve found a large number of slides that I’d like to digitise. Anyone recommend a scanner?

If it were me I would send them off to a slide scanning service.

There’s many many boxes.

I bought a Veho slide scanner with the notion that I could later sell it on for not much less than I paid for it.

That was about 15 years ago, I really should get around to actually doing the scanning.

We got a cheap one from Aldi. It’s essentially a webcam over a lightbox. If you;re near Marple you;re welcome to borrow it, but a commercial service while expensive will produce better results without taking far too much of your time…

There’s many many boxes.

How many slides? I did a quick search for 500 slides scanned to 1200dpi (including digital despeckling) and that was only £85. If you have more than 500 then it would be an insanely long and painful job to do and you would need Photoshop or similar to set up a task to despeckle/correct colours etc them too. Quick maths suggests it would take 25 hours to scan, despeckle and file 500 images assuming 3 minutes per slide. I would much rather spend £85.

If it were me I would send them off to a slide scanning service

Very very much this. It’s slow and tedious to do any number and the results will be far far better from a proper service than a cheap scanner, a decent scanner will likely cost more than having it done properly.

Plustek slide scanners are good. Cost about £200. And it can be rather slow, especially if you want to tweak each image.

On that note,

Can anyone recommend a slide scanning service?

In a recommend what you use way:

Epson Perfection V600 PHOTO.

It has various trays to suit film negatives and slides of various dimensions and software to sort out colour B&W etc. I’m not going to say it’s fast but the results are really impressive when shown on a TV. The biggest problem is dust and grot on the slides, if anyone has suggestions on how to get sticky dust off slides without damage I’m all ears.

Edit: the digital clean-ups do or don’t work depending on what the subject is. I’m not sure I’d want to spec it on every slide if done commercially.

Second recommendation on a Epson V600, did my late FIL slide collection about 1200 slides (colour correction etc on about half of them) took a very long weekend. Made into a CD for his sons and daughters..