I just picked up 1000 of my dad's slides for scanning – does anyone have any experience of a task like this?

It'll take forever! Pay one of the online services to do it for you.

I lent Tribalchief a slide projector earlier this week for the very same task.

Project the slide onto the screen, put your camera on a tripod and click away.

You can also do some composition enhancement.

I have no idea how it's going to turn out though.

at £1 per slide ??

I have no idea how it's going to turn out though

it will be shite 🙁

I didn't agree £1 a slide with him, but I'm sure he won't mind. 8)

Yes I did this very thing, to make Christmas gifts for the family.
The slide holder held 3 slides, this took a good few seconds to place them all in correctly, placing them into the scanner took another few seconds, then, pushing them through the scanner took a few seconds, but it was the light correcting and getting the focus right which took me ages.

The way I did it was an hour each night after work, otherwise you'll go bonkers 🙂

Oh yes, forgot to mention, I had to dust each and every one – arrrggghhh.

So the conclusion (rockhopper is correct) 1,000 Is going to take a long time.

£1 is the going rate at a shop, but maybe for 1000 slides you could strike a deal, still going to be expensive, just wondering if it would be cheaper to get them put onto a CD?

My wife uses one of these
http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=225878&C=Froogle&U=225878&T=Module

For £60 it's great. 6 slides at a time and our computer is a year old – it does the job fairly quickly. The results are pretty good. Sure it's not going to be pixel perfect like modern digital photos, but they do have the feel of an old film camera which is exactly what they are.

I'm sure she has some of them on Flickr – if I find them I'll post a link…

Aldi have just what you're looking for, coming up on 25th March. 45 squid.

linky

Buy a decent scanner (say a Canon 8800F) and then scan them, plus any photo's you have and after you've finished sell it. You will easily get at least 3/4 of your money back especially if you keep it in good condition. Yes it will take a while but you can remove bit's of dust etc on your slides and crop them easily too. Well worth it in the end too.

I wouldn't bother wit the high-end stuff scanners unless you are going to spend serious money and do some serious work in photohop or the like. – if you want to get prints, you can always print from the slides themselves. Assuming you just want a copy on the PC for ease of viewing, then the aldi job is fine. I got one of the Aldi jobbies last time round, it's EXACTLY the same as the one in the maplin link from Zedsdead, note though that it take 6 negatives or 3 slides. The new aldi one has a neat built in screen, I like that. If you want to borrow our scanner just let me know – we're unlikely ever to use it again TBH. If you decide to go to your local Aldo, make sure you;r there at opening time – first time I went to get one I went at lunch and they'd all gone. Second time I was there at 9am opening, fifth in the queue and by the time I'd purchased mine at 9.10, I got the 7th of the 8 they'd had delivered…

Don't buy one of the cheap slide scanners.

You may have 1000 slides, but how many do you want to actually digitise?

Go through em, chose 100 that are representative, get em done professionally for a quid a pop and then archive the rest of them.

As you can see, BigJohns method was far from laser sharp – not quite as true to the original as I'd like – will try the Aldi scanner

I bought a high end scanner and the results are fantastic but it takes a F***ING long time 🙁

Seconding Bunnyhop and Dr and geoff j – a dedicated slide scanner will get you the best results by far (we have highish-end flatbeds at work, and my eBay Minolta slide scanner beats them hands down), but it takes a *very* long time and a lot of care re dust. I wouldn't even contemplate scanning 1000.

Found one.

The scan is much bigger than that and the detail is pretty good. Hopefully that'll give you an idea of what it can do.

40p a slide is more like the rate i was able to find. Cheap Aldi slide copiers are rubbish as well.

I did some family history slides using a D300 and a lightbox from Jessops. Set the camara on a tripod and set focus manually, then blew dust off the slide with a rocket blower, placed at preset position on lightbox and took 10 megapixel photo. It was fine as the quality of the original slides weren't perfect . Lightbox was about £20, and I had the rest. You could always get a first set done like this and professionally do the best ones. I found indexing them was the most difficult-no exif data relevant to the slide 😉

I brought a good A4 flat bed scanner (Canon 9950F) which will take 18 slides in one go. I just set it going and come back 45 minutes later and re-load. The plan was to get a good scanner. spent a few weeks scanning, then sell it. That was about five years ago!

I bought a CanoScan 5600F- £100. A lot of the scanners that get good recommendations are not available anymore – dont know whether cheaper ones have improved or the market just isn't there.

Negs Scanned at 1200DPI takes about 1min – it will also do slides and scan at 4800dpi. I didn't notice a big enough difference to justify the extra time for better quality. I thought I would get them all in fairly fast and then see what could be improved on the better ones. I did about 150 in a couple of evenings in a first burst of enthusiasm – and then found better things to do!

result below with no precleaning and nothing altered – bit grainy but good enough for an archive for me

The problem with negs is old ones have curved so giving a rainbow effect across some of the scans but slides should be better.

I'm looking at doing something similar, but using these guys:
http://www.iphotoscanning.co.uk/shopexd.asp?id=235

48p/slide quoted, but I'd hope you can get a better deal.

Nick

Even £1 a slide is not expensive – the expensive thing is that you have 1000 of them! Dedicated slide scanner is vastly better than flat bed or other alternative (can't imagine the Aldi one is going to be all that great). I'd reduce the number if at all possible and send them off to a service.

I'd reduce the number if at all possible and send them off to a service.

yes, I'm thinking I'll get hold of a projector that will take the racks they're in and pick out the ones to be scanned as I have very little patience 🙂

I've just had 857 slides done at £0.16 a slide from Karmaan. Partly chose him because he is based in Swindon and I live in Chippenham. It was cheaper to deliver the slides by hand than posting and eliminate any worries about getting things lost in the post.

He uses a dedicated high end slide scanner that produces images of approximately 4800 x 3200. That's big. You probably won't be able to achieve that with a cheapo slide scanner or flat bed scanner with an adapter. Also, do you really have to the time to scan 800, 900 or 1000 slides without going insane?

thanks hoodoo, that sounds a lot more affordable 🙂