Where to start with a life time of slides?

[Birma]

I'm not entirely sure this is the right section of the forum as I need advice as much on the approach to scanning, as the scanners themselves. My wife's grandparents have all of their family history of pictures on slides. The whole process of setting up the projector screen and loading the carousel etc. is just too much for them now, but they would still like to be able to look at old memories. They have seen my pictures shown on the TV and are now looking for a digital solution for their slide collection - and of course hoping I can advise them .

1. Do we invest in equipment to scan the slides ourselves, or pay someone to do this? (Either way I think we will have to do this in phases.)

2. Any recommendations for either home equipment, or commercial outfits who do this for you?

3. Ideas for digital presentation to the non-digitally minded? (My view at the moment is to get JPG sets on to DVD as this is within their current capabilities.)

The pictures are family snaps; obviously of emmense emotional value, but of no special quality. Any thoughts and advice will be much appreciated.

[David Kilpatrick]

£8 inc post will buy you a custom cut 5 x 4 sheet of opal perspex (I got five of them made, minimum order). Purchase an IKEA ornament lamp, or an LED source, and make a slide copy rig. I have done several tests now using the A900 and a macro lens, and also the A550 and macro lens, and as long as the slides are not badly scratched or covered in dirt, the results are good enough for my Alamy files.

After buying my perspex I picked up a complete auto Pentax K bellows with copier, boxed, for all of £8 at a local market (genuine Pentax - made by Novoflex, like the Minolta bellows and indeed most Japanese camera brand bellows were - they never said so, but they bought the parts from Germany and that's why Novoflex survived as a company). So I plan to try that instead of my vertical copystand arrangement with LED light.

You can copy a slide about every 10 seconds using a setup like this.

David

[Bruce Oudekerk]

There are two issues here. One is copying the slides and two is the delivery process.

David’s suggestion is excellent especially because it is quick and reasonably priced. I believe for more optimal results scanning is the way to go and here speed and effort are inversely proportional to costs. Any decent flatbed scanner will likely provide excellent results. My favorite is the Epson V700. Its quick for a flatbed, has digital ice for automatic flaw removal and is rugged. The dedicated Nikon 35mm scanners are faster and even much faster at digital ice and, naturally, more expensive. The most expensive method is to have them scanned…AND the easiest solution of all. These scanning solutions are best only if you need maximum accuracy otherwise David’s solution is best. I would actually like to see a comparison of a high quality slide properly scanned and PP compared to a dSLR slide copy. But I get the feeling that quick and modest cost is good enough especially since you talk about DVD and TV. …which brings us to delivery…

DVD to TV is relatively easy and mimics the projection screen without the hassle. Another alternative is an image hosting site like PBase assuming the viewers have a computer. Even computer illiterates can access a site like this with a desktop icon to click on and a simple point and click environment. It has an advantage in that family can share…even when traveling to friends. If you have internet access…you have your pics. No DVD, DVD player or TV needed…not even a thumbdrive. Another elegant solution is an iPad. For those that struggle with technology, the IPad is especially brilliant because it mimics physical interaction. Set it up and the learning curve is short. My 3 year old grandson is a wiz at playing games, watching movies and looking at pictures on my son’s iPad.

Bruce

[pakodominguez]

http://www.scancafe.com/
good quality, best price -but weird because you are sending your slides to India in order to get them scanned...

[UrsaMajor]

http://www.scancafe.com/

good quality, best price -but weird because you are sending your slides to India in order to get them scanned...

This is the option that I was going to suggest. I have not used them myself, but they were recommended to me by one of the in-house professional photographers that works for my employer - which is a Fortune 50 company. He's been making his living as a photographer for 35+ years, and has a large slide collection of personal images. When I was discussing the subject of digitizing slides with him a couple of weeks ago, he told me that he is sending his personal slides to Scancafe to be converted, and has been satisfied with the results.

With best wishes,
- Tom -

[Dusty]

I plan to go thru my Dad's slides of the Korean War with him before he get too forgetful of what was what. I plan on videotaping the whole thing. That way, I can later scan the slides and add his commentary either in text or dubbing the video's audio track to the slide show.

Dusty

[Birma]

Many thanks to you all for your ideas, suggestions and recommendations. They are very much appreciated. I've been in contact with Scan Cafe (nice site) but they don't yet offer their service outside USA (but they are hoping to expand!). I'm looking at UK providers (any UK suggestions?), but I want to also try the diy approach.

David, I will PM you re. purchasing a sheet of the OPAL perspex .

[wrosephil]

Just joined the forum and was interested in this thread as I have a similar problem.

I came across this UK site for scanning although I have not used them (yet).

http://www.mr-scan.co.uk/

Phil

[Dr. Harout]

Welcome Phil.
Did good joining this wonderful forum.
In every winter time I do lots of negatives, slides scanning and conversion to digital... and it it just doesn't end

[chorleyjeff]

£8 inc post will buy you a custom cut 5 x 4 sheet of opal perspex (I got five of them made, minimum order). Purchase an IKEA ornament lamp, or an LED source, and make a slide copy rig. I have done several tests now using the A900 and a macro lens, and also the A550 and macro lens, and as long as the slides are not badly scratched or covered in dirt, the results are good enough for my Alamy files.

After buying my perspex I picked up a complete auto Pentax K bellows with copier, boxed, for all of £8 at a local market (genuine Pentax - made by Novoflex, like the Minolta bellows and indeed most Japanese camera brand bellows were - they never said so, but they bought the parts from Germany and that's why Novoflex survived as a company). So I plan to try that instead of my vertical copystand arrangement with LED light.

You can copy a slide about every 10 seconds using a setup like this.

David

Just rejoined the forum and picked up this post.
I tried using a 5in x 4in slide viewer rather than the opal perspex but the light is not quite even and shows up in prints. So, I guess, I need a more even light source preferably daylight balanced. What type of lamp is the IKEA ornament lamp and how far from the perspex is it placed?
Is the perspex you refer to the sort used in illuminated display signs? If not where can the perspex be bought?
Just had the thought that placing a perspex sheet above the slide viewer might even out the light enough to get good even lighting.
Cheers
Jeff

[David Kilpatrick]

I'm using an LED lamp now - much better. Even one of those small LED torches will do the job, the type you get at a garage with 12 LEDs or so.

David

[alphaomega]

I am presently scanning slides using my Minolta Dimage 5400 Mk. 2. Still going strong and precious.
Reading through the comments above with plenty of good advice I suddenly remembered I have a Jessop Zoom Slide Duplicator in MD fit. Luckily I managed to find it and wonder if anyone has converted slides to digital images by fitting such a duplicator to a DSLR. I guess I could fit the duplicator to my A580 using the "lens not fitted" setting and shutter priority. I have a glassless MD to A-mount converter which should do the job. I must try this as an alternative to scanning each slide. Problem is I have lost the instruction booklet and will need to experiment with the two adjustment settings. It can do 1x to 2.5x so I can even crop when copying although with the A580 I will be better just copying 100% of the slide and crop in PS. Used to copy in daylight, but David's LED advice is sound.

[bakubo]

I'm not entirely sure this is the right section of the forum as I need advice as much on the approach to scanning, as the scanners themselves.

Birma, have you started on this project yet? How did you decide to do it?

I have a Minolta Scan Elite that I bought in 1999. It uses a SCSI interface and I have an old SCSI PCI card that I bought for my desktop back then. I haven't used a desktop for several years though. I then bought a SCSI PCMCIA card for my notebook PC, but the last several notebooks I have bought no longer have a PCMCIA slot so I no longer have a way to use the scanner.

In 2000 over a period of about 6 months I scanned about 2000 slides/negatives. It was a big job since I had to use a lightbox to select which ones to scan, clean each slide/negative, and then do a full resolution scan using multi-sampling (usually 4 or 8 times), which makes the scan take much longer, to reduce noise (used Vuescan). Someday I would like to go through all my slides/negatives again and scan even more of them.

[Birma]

Hi Henry - sorry for the delay in getting back to you. My orginal plan had been to go with David's suggestion of using a macro lens to photograph the slides through a home made viewer, and then process them as normal. In the end I was very busy with work before Christmas and the scane were required for a Chirstmas present. We found a service in the UK the looked reasonable. and we send about 200 slides to be scanned with jpg's put on to a CD. The results of the scanning were ok but the service wasn't great. (I burnt them to a DVD slideshow myself as the one provided was very poor.)

The project is on hold at the moment. My wife's grandparents, whose slides I was getting scanned, I think were a bit overcome with seeing these pictures from 50 years ago and they are reconsidering if, and how many more, they want to do.

I think, for the quality of the slides I was getting scanned, I would probably look at getting someone else to do it, but I may shop around form some other service providers. I would still like to try David's suggested method when I get some time as this would be better (once I got it to work!) for just a small number of slides.

[bakubo]

I think, for the quality of the slides I was getting scanned, I would probably look at getting someone else to do it, but I may shop around form some other service providers. I would still like to try David's suggested method when I get some time as this would be better (once I got it to work!) for just a small number of slides.

Doing a good job scanning is a learned skill. From 1998 to 2000 I went through 3 scanners and none of them gave the best results by doing a simple scan using the defaults. I started using Vuescan in 1998 when it was the beta 0.7 version and was just a command line program. Vuescan gives a huge amount of control, but has a big learning curve. The software that came with the scanner was easier to use, but the results weren't usually as good. I have no idea how things are now with the current scanners and software that comes with them. The resulting scan with a good, wide histogram and color as close as I could get it from Vuescan still requires a lot of work afterwards. I suspect most of the scanning services just use the automated default software settings and don't give you all that good a scan.

For my later scans I saved the raw 64-bit (RGBI) scan file so I can go back to it and use current versions of Vuescan to "rescan" and I do that sometimes. Vuescan will accept the raw file as input so you can reprocess it.