35mm slide scanner reccomendations?
 

I have at least 1000 35mm slides that need to be scanned and digitized before they deteriorate further and am looking for suggestions for a slide scanner. Did a search but the posts seemed fairly dated and this sort of stuff advances quickly.

I have a slide scanner attachment for a scanner around here somewhere, I will see if I can find it. :D

I think I still have an old flatbed scanner that does slides. Possibly a parallel port type. Free to good home if I can find it in the pile of dinasoar bones. Will check this weekend. With some of these old devices it is hard to find drivers for modern OS though.

I'll trade my slide scanner attachment for a GIANT!!! Steak. :D

I've had a couple of flatbed scanners over the years that had slide scanning capability but found them wonky and essentially unusable. They would only do a few at a time and then the images came out goofy and needed lots of manipulation in Photoshop before saving. Professional quality scanners like Nikon and Minolta are scary expensive. Cheap dedicated slide and film scanners will often scan at an unacceptably low DPI resolution and not have the ability to save images as TIFFs, only as compressed Jpegs.
Since only real filmgeeks take film slides anymore, your operation is probably a one time affair. Mine was. I had about 900 slides professionally scanned at 4K Dpi and saved as TIFFs. Cost at the time was around 0.35 each. The company I used will scan at various resolutions and put up a digital album online for previewing. They let me delete up to 10 percent of the photos and did not charge me for those deletions. It's an AZ company but I'm sure you have such services over there in Tejas too.
It was about the same cost as a mid priced scanner that I would have had to have sitting around unused and eventually end up selling for less than I paid for it, but which would not have given me the pro results I wanted. No learning curve is a huge plus too. You might want to think about that.
Here's the folks I used.
35mm Slides 126 110 format slides to CD DVD disc professional high quality

I'm closely watching this thread. I have some slides from the seventies and eighties that need to be scanned. One in particular is my son at the age of about five years standing next to a Ferrari F1 car at the Dallas Grand Prix ca. 1985 or so. Somehow we stumbled into the pits before the race with no pit pass.

I remember about ten years ago, seeing some scans of slides from just a regular flat bed scanner that were pretty sharp.

I tend to agree that having a service do the conversion is the best way to go for consistent quality and likely costs depending on what value you place on time.

However, I suggest that a careful eye be taken to editing down the number of images that should be scanned. Absent some personal historical/sentimental value, we tend to keep way too many images that shouldn't be shown. ;)

Agreed. We have stacks of pictures and volumes of jpegs that could probably be pared down to 25% and we would not have lost anything.

Sorting through and having a service convert the keepers seems to be a pretty good suggestion.:)

Ion Omni Scanner
 

Amazon.com: ION OMNI SCAN Stand-Alone Image and Slide Scanner: Electronics

I got one a month ago, scanned 500 slides and got good results. Uses USB for power, no computer needed for storage of pix, as it takes a SD card.
Max resolution is about 900K per shot.

I would recommend for slides, have not used it for negative strips.

It all depends on the quality you're after. If you like to make art-prints and sell them I would invest in a Nikon CoolScan 5000 ED Scanner. Or if you search you can find a drum scanner for cheap, of-course cheap is relative.

If it's just for sentimental purpose I would go with a flat bed scanner and a slide attachement. Quality will be less and most likely dust removal won't be as good.

Minolta and Nikon film scanners were pretty much the standard back in the days.

Thanks for the link Nate! I bought one to be one of my wife's Christmas gifts. I expect that she'll be crazy about it.

Another forum I frequent that specializes in exterior industrial photography had a section on scanners. A recommendation was made for the Canon CanoScan 5600F. Surfing, I found one for about $85 on Amazon.

Anyone know about it?

Thanks Nate!
This is almost exactly what I'm looking for.

RLeo

If anyone wants a sample, send me a PM
 

and I'll send you a coulple of pix from 30 years ago and let you decide.
They will be unretouched.
Best,
Nate