Slide Scanners

[Brainonska511]

My dad has a lot of old slides from his father sitting around and he's recently started to go through them for recording family history. In the interest of archiving them and preserving some semblance of the photos, he's taken to racking them up on an old projector and taking digital photos of them. Obviously, this isn't the best way to do it. But I see that they make slide scanners now. How good are they for scanning large batches of slides? Does anyone have any recommendations on what might be best?

He'd probably want something that's relatively simple to use and perhaps something you could simply take the mounted slides and push through one at a time (ie: not having to replace a slide within a clunky adapter for each scan; or at the very least, an adapter that holds multiple slides at a time).

 

[corkyg]

Definitely a worthwhile project. I have done this many times over the years.

The basic sorting tool is not expensive - a light table. That is where you can dump many slides and quickly see which ones you want to archive.

My first major experience was back in 1996 when my father-in-law died. He had over 100 carrousels full. It took me a couple of days to go through them with a light table/box. Most were photos taken on trips and cruises. I decided to only keep those involving family members. That ended upo about 200 or so. I scanned those 4 at a time with an Epson Photo scanner.

I have done the same thing with my own carrousels.

Here is a pretty good review of several photo scanners
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/scanrex.htm

Scanning aside, the light table or box is the basic sorting and selection tool. And, if one doesn't want to do a lot of that, there are also online services which do this for you at a reasonable cost. Most can be accessed through Amazon.

 

[Brainonska511]

I think the sorting is mostly done - the cartridges the slides are in are labeled and my grandfather had 'note' slides in many of the cartridges.

I should probably find out how many slides he actually has, how many he'd want to scan, and how much he'd want to spend scanning them. Time isn't too much of a factor these days, as he's retired, so he can take his time if he wants. Though, there seems to be two types of scanners: $100-$400 scanners that can hold 4-6 slides at once and the $1000+ that can hold 50+ slides at once.

 

[corkyg]

And, weigh those costs against having them done commercially. Example:

http://www.scancafe.com/services/slide-scanning

Having 1000 slides scanned would cost about $220, and you don't have to do anything.