Slides to Digital

[thiggy]

My dad died a couple of years ago and my mom asked me and my brother to go through his slides to decide what we would like to keep and discard the rest. My dad was an avid photographer all of his adult life and there are probably thousands of slides. I would like to purchase a scanner to convert his (and my) slides to digital images. There are also lots of negatives that I would like to convert. Looking on the internet, I see that there are lots of choices in photo/slide scanners. The prices range from less than $100 to over $2000. I don't know enough about the process to make an informed decision about what to purchase. Do any of you folks have suggestions about what features I should look for, and do you have any specific recommendations make, model, etc. Thanks

[LCHIEN]

i have had a older slide to digital converter and my comment if you have thousands of slides is to get one that scans quickly and loads easily. Prefereably with some kind of autoloader if available. Converting that many slides will be a time-consuming operation.

[jziegler]

You might want to look into using a conversion service. Scanning film and touching them up is a very time consuming process. I have a dedicated film scanner, and it is not a terribly fun process (and is part of why I have given up on film completly). If you do buy a scanner, make sure that it has digital ICE (which is a scratch and dust removal process). Mine doesn't have it, and I wish that it did.

If you are a costco member, they advertise in their stores that they do converstion. There are also many mail away places, some of them will scan a large number for you to preview and you only pay for the ones that you want the high res files from.

Jim

[Ed62]

I'll second the digital ICE recommendation. If you decide to buy a scanner, get one that has a high optical resolution. Most (all?) scanners advertise the interpolated (upscaled) resolution. This is done to decieve the buying public. Interpolated resolution does not give added information (detail). In other words, just for comparison, if a scanner has an optical resolution of 1600 and an interpolated resolution of 4800, you will get the same detail if you scan at 1600 or 4800. You will get more pixels at 4800, but the extra pixels are simply a software guess as to what they should be.

Ed

[tseavoy]

Not too long ago, I was thinking of doing the same thing. Here is a link I found:

http://www.modelerschoice.com/Articles/slideconvert.htm

If you have a digital camera, all you need is a light box.
Since I still have the old slide projector, I was thinking of just projecting the slides on the wall and taking pictures of the projected images. Now that darkness is coming sooner in the evening, I will try that. I have a 1GB card for the camera and a USB reader/writer. I can use Photoshop for cropping and filtering the images.

Tom on Marrowstone

NECTAR, n. A drink served at banquets of the Olympian deities. The secret of its preparation is lost, but the modern Kentuckians believe that they come pretty near to a knowledge of its chief ingredient.

[cgallery]

If you've thought of purchasing a nice DSLR, you can slide adapters that allow you to do this in an armchair at home. Here is one lower-end example:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...g_Adapter.html

The higher-end ones even have a light source behind the slide.

And if you get a more expensive camera, you can probably even tether it to the PC and you don't even have to worry about filling memory cards.

[LCHIEN]

Reviewing the suggestions received, and as a avid photographer who shot lots and lots of Kodachrome 64 and spooled my own Ektachrome 35mm canisters I have this question: Is the conversion supposed to save his best images in all their glory or are you just attempting to save something of his? Are you planning on saving the best 500 slides or are you going to copy everything to have a record of his photo career?

There are slide copiers that fit on the end of a camera lens and you can also photograph images projected on the wall. But these are generally less than 100% satisfactory compared to a scanner. The problems are that they all use lenses which have curved image field (focus plane is on a spherical surface) and image abberations like barrel distortion and flare, most camera optics are optimized for far field photos and copying slides is almost 1:1 macro work. Also the lighting tends to be less than perfectly uniform. Projecting on a wall, ahem, gives the light the color characteristics of the wall. Now if you're not fussy, its not too big a deal. But if you are discerning then it will be. THere are solutions which tend to be expensive for the average user and they require special illumination boxes for even lighting and DSLR flat field 1:1 macro lenses which are also expensive. I had a Olympus 55mm f3.5 macro lens for my 35mm OM cameras, it cost $350 20 years ago. In the old days, copying slides was analog to analog so this was the way it was done.

Scanners on the other hand and flat field and very non distorting by their inherent physical geometry. THe lights are usually very good, uniform and properly color balanced across the field especially on your higher end units. If you are seriously copying then a scanner is your best bet for analog-digital images.

The big problem I found (and its why my library is not copied) is that the time and effort was large. The slide and negative scanenr I got allowes a warm-up/stabilization period for the light source of a few seconds, then the scanning took a few seconds. The slides had to be cleaned, so its easy to take 1 minute or more per slide... even without any phot manipulation (cropping or exposure adjustments). At one minute its not enough to do something else concurrently but will keep you going for hours of tedious work.


So, just a few thngs to think about.

[jziegler]

The big problem I found (and its why my library is not copied) is that the time and effort was large. The slide and negative scanenr I got allowes a warm-up/stabilization period for the light source of a few seconds, then the scanning took a few seconds. The slides had to be cleaned, so its easy to take 1 minute or more per slide... even without any phot manipulation (cropping or exposure adjustments). At one minute its not enough to do something else concurrently but will keep you going for hours of tedious work.


So, just a few thngs to think about.

Add in even basic editing and you are easily at 5-10 minutes per slide/negative frame. And that just does color/exposure correction, sharpening, contrast enhancement, and other global edits like that. Anything at the pixel level (dust removal, scratch removal, etc) takes much longer. A service will make your work faster. Some of them actually ship the film to India where labor is cheaper and do the labor intensive work there.

I've read decent things about scancafe, they scan it all and you pay for what you want (but they have a 50% minimum, so some sorting should probably be done first). I've never used them, but it looks decent. As I said before, Costco might be an option, I don't know what their cost is. If you buy a scanner and DIY it, be prepared to spend many hours.

Jim

[thiggy]

Lchien, in answer to your 2nd post, my primary intent is to copy slides which show family events and people. I am not especially interested in the many photos of Mother and Dad's vacations, nor the myriad landscape and nature shots. They were avid Audubon and Ornothological Society members. Nevertheless, I think that I will be copying a fairly large number (100s) of slides and older negatives.

Thanks to all for your observations and suggestions.

[Richard in Smithville]

Earlier this summer I was looking into copying my dad's collection of large format slides and negatives. Most are over 50 years old. I found out just how expensive it would be to get these scanned and the owner ( very knowledgeable) suggested this scanner as being one of the best for the home market. It has what I would need to copy large format film as well as smaller 35mm.

[thiggy]

Richard, did you purchase the suggested scanner? If not, what did you do? Thanks. Thiggy

[Richard in Smithville]

Unfortunatelly it wasn't in the wallet this summer. I have delt with Camtech in the past and really trust them. In fact they use the pro version of this scanner in their store. The negs and slides have been kept safe for over 50 years so waiting another year won't hurt.

[thiggy]

After reading other comments and reviews of this scanner, I ordered one from Amazon this afternoon. $172.98, with free shipping.