Any reasonably priced slide scanners?

Need to scan old slides

[Wlauzon]

I need to scan a bunch (1500 or so) of older slides, dating from around 1960 to 1985 and get them onto some kind of digital medium.

Is there any reasonably price scanner made just for this purpose?

After two hours surfing all I have found is a couple of $2000+ machines. Those look like museum or archival quality resolution, I don't need that.

Any ideas?

[phranque]

you can find stuff in the $1-200's by mintek and primefilm, but i would look on ebay for the best used nikon you can afford.
also you should decide now if you want to hand load 1500 slides or if you want an auto loading model...

[Matt Probert]

I find the Epson Perfection 1260 very acceptable for photographs and negatives, I believe it also handles slides, though it's hand loaded and at 1500 slides that's a lot of work. It's quite an old scanner, but if I have one it wasn't expensive, probably less than £200 sterling when new.

Matt

[Staffa]

Earlier this year I bought a Plustek Opticfilm 7200 for all my B/W, colour negatives and slides at about £100 and it handles the job very well.

[phranque]

also remember that slides are based on light transmission rather than reflection so keep that in mind when comparing specs.
you want the brightest light source and to detect the most shades of darkness...

[Wlauzon]

Thanks for the info, now that I have a couple of real model numbers I know what to search for.

There are actually around 4000 slides, but I can eliminate 2/3 of them as being worth the effort just by tossing them on an old light box I got a few years back.

But still 1500 is a lot - and it seems that the average scan speed for high res is 2-3 minutes each.

I might have to rethink this. I suspect there are probably only maybe 200-300 slides really worth saving, or at least worthy of hi-res scans. I really don't feel like spending like what seems to be $600+ for an automated scanner that will only ever be used once.

I considered just having it done by a commercial place, but the cheapest one was around $1.50 per slide + some other fees.

[edited by: Wlauzon at 9:56 pm (utc) on Aug. 21, 2007]

[jimbeetle]

It will be slow going at first as you get used to whatever and software setup, but once you get a routine set you'll be surprised at how quickly you can work.

Slides dating from the '60s through '80s undoubtedly will have lost a lot of detail and have some color shifts. You can fix all of this in photoshop, but will probably spend a lot of time trying to do so. A bit pricy -- but well worth it -- are a set of Kodak plug-ins for photoshop. They're great time savers.

[John_Blake]

Microtek 1000XL Pro Flatbed Scanner
Film & Slide Scanner - 3200 x 6400 dpi Optical, 48-bit color depth, Connects Via Hi-Speed USB and FireWire, PC and Mac Compatible.