Slides to Digital

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

My mam has about a billion slides from the sixties and the seventies, and we haven't looked at them in forever. I have basically been entrusted to find some way of converting them to some digital format.

There has to be some means of doing this relatively easily or cheaply.

Help me OTF, you're my only hope.

[Femme Folle]

Slides to Digital

Funnily enough, I saw a converter somewhere on the internet and was considering it for my dad (but changed my mind). I'll see if I can find it again.

[Femme Folle]

Slides to Digital

Here's one, but that's not the site where I found it earlier.

[Femme Folle]

Slides to Digital

Here you go. On amazon.co.uk

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Slides to Digital

I love you femme folle, you're more useful than a small pot.

[Femme Folle]

Slides to Digital

I like to think I'm more useful than an electric kettle, but that might be pushing it.

You're welcome

[Mumpo]

Slides to Digital

There was something about the title of this thread that made me think twice about clicking it.

[loose cannon]

Slides to Digital

Quick word of warning, we got a slide scanner which was absolutely crap, veeeeery sloooow and the image quality wasn't great (in Frau Kannon's opinion). If you have as many as you make out you should get a decent (ie expensive) machine which will handle trays of slides at a time.

Or...

Join a camera club, some of them have excellent equipment that is available to members. Since you're in London in the land of the camera buff, there may be options there.

[Ginger Yellow]

Slides to Digital

My mum looked into this for her enormous collection of slides and decided it was simpler and possibly cheaper to just pay someone to do it, given the quality problem. Certainly I've read some review of slide scanners that were not very favourable. She is the world's biggest technophobe, though, so it could just be that.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Slides to Digital

FF, There are few things more useful than a small pot.

GY, I was thinking along those lines. It's just that it would probably cost a small fucking fortune in Ireland. LC, I'm in dublin now, and my mam is in galway so that's not really an option.

We're thinking of going with this

[anton pulisov]

Slides to Digital

I scan in negatives using a flatbed scanner with one of those slide/film plastic loader things. It takes absolutely ages.

If there's a shop that have an industrial scale scanner and are willing to do a whole lot in one go, then I'd go with them. But then they charge an arm and a leg.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Slides to Digital

oh my, there are over 1500 slides. There is no fucking way that we are going to do this ourselves.

[mafu]

Slides to Digital

it can be a bit of a ballache

i have a dedicated film scanner, which can take slides, a plustek 7200. it cost about £100 and can do a fairly decent job:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3023/...951846af_o.jpg

it struggles with certain slides though, where there is a lot of contrast and deep shadows - it doesnt have the oomph to read all the information that is there. there are scanners that apparently do this better but they quickly become a lot more expensive as far as i can see

the other thing to mention is that there is a certain amount of fiddling about required to get the optimum result (for each slide), and the software is quite techy and has a steepish learning curve.

[mafu]

Slides to Digital

the cheapest option would probably be to tape them to the window and take a photo of them with a digital camera. some people do actually do this, with varying degrees of sophistication.

[anton pulisov]

Slides to Digital

Sometimes when I load a load of slides at once it scans half of one slide and half of another slide, making that one slide.

Scanning such a small area like a slide/negative at photograph quality resolution also takes ages.

Takes me about 5-10 minutes per negative. This is the main reason why my scanner is gathering masses of dust. It would be quicker just to develop the things and then scan the photos in on a flatbed, which is a faster scanning process.

But there has to be an industrial scanning service out there somewhere that can do 1500 slides quickly and deliver them on CD-Rs.