Hi all,
My mum's got loads of 35mm slides that she wants to scan- can anyone recommend a good scanner for this? Don't want to spend a fortune but want something reasonable and they do seem to vary wildly in price!
Also if anyone has one for sale I would be interested
Thanks
I wouldn't be recommending ANY scanner, very quickly.... I'd ask
1) How many Slides?
2) What do you want the scans for?
3) How good you want them?
4) How much money you got to spend?
5)
How much time you got to spare?
Biggest bit of the job is the TIME.
I have maybe 20ooo negatives and slides in my own archive, I have been trying to work my way through for the last two years... it is NOT a quick job.
And the SCANNER or how 'fast' it claims to be, doesn't really make much difference in that.
Hardest part of the job, is organizing the slides and negs, so you know which ones are done, and which ones are to be done; cleaning and preparing them, loading them in the slide carrier, THEN, sorting them out on the PC, and where needed touching, tidying and restoring them in Photo-Shop...... of the maybe 4ooo I have got to PC in the last two years, only maybe 1/5th of them have been tidied up.
I have carrier bags and shoe boxes more, dumped on me by various friends and relatives, when they have cleared out parents attics to shuffle them into a home or whatever..... ALL moaning at me that they haven't been 'done' in a decade, after I 'told' them I could do them!... Be warned... the word 'CAN' is a query of potentiality, it is NOT a faithful, carved in stone promise, WITH absolute implicit deadline attached!!!! However....
If there's only a few slides, my advice, especially to MY mother, would be just DON'T... she complains about her computer getting a virus every time she tries to open an e-mail! Which sort of offers another imperative, you need to be a bit PC savvy, and be prepared to spend more time learning the software.
So, if there's only a few images, get the projector out, or buy a viewer box; pick the pictures she REALLY wants e-copies of... send only them to a lab for a pro-scan. They'll pop them onto a CD, and for what it costs you'll get good scans, for least hassle...
Cheap 'Aldi' type scanners, might cost under £50 and look like they would pay for them self against farming out to a service, even for relatively few images; BUT, factor in the learning time, factor in the actual scanning time, factor in the pretty low quality scans... not really.
Historically, I bought an Acer Scanwit 2720 SCSI film scanner, in Y2K, instead of what were actually rather expensive and not that wonderful DSLR's of the time. Great bit of kit, cost about £500 at the time; chucks out 10Mega-Pixie scans from a 35mm slide or neg; better than anything direct-to-digital SLR for best part of a decade, but oh-so-slow... especially on an early Pentium II computer of the era. Took most of the night to scan a strip of four slides, IF the computer didn't blue-screen at the enormity of the task...
About ten years ago, I bought one of the cheap "Web-Cam" scanners like the average Aldi or e-bay special; USB plug-and-play, claims 17Mega pixies, and cost about £50.. looked too good to be true... it was, really. Dedicated software, it is NOT a scanner; its a web-cam over a light-box, and the camera resolution is only actually 5Mega-Pixies or so, its inflated by 'interpolation' or electric guess-work. Colour depth is dire; and scanning options are pretty limited.... reasonably 'quick' though.... and good enough for face-book type display where scans are likely to be down-sized for display anyway, B-U-T... no great shakes.
After working my way through maybe 1/3 of the archive over a couple of years... and take note... running out of hard-drive space and having to buy a second one.... I realized just how much of the work was in the organisation and prep.... so re-visited the old ScanWit..... originally abandoned in a PC upgrade, cos its drivers didn't seem to work; I bought another, 2nd hand of e-bay for £30 which was cheaper than a new SCSI card to try make it work.... but, with a bit of messing, sorting out the SCSI interface cards, getting more up-to-date Hanrick VueScan scanner software to get the drivers to work... WOW... have to run it on an 'old' Win-XP PC cos windows 7 and 64bit systems don't like SCSI... but; 10Mpix res, 64bit colour depth, and a bit of time and care and know-how., great scans... and, for LESS than the cost of an Aldi-cam-scan, off e-bay..... and practically given the time overhead of sifting, sorting and touching, pretty much 'as fast'
Which begs suggestion that the e-bay special web-cam scanners are NOT really worth the money; they tend to be packed full of features, like LCD preview screen, or SD card slot, rather than a great electric eye or colour depth, or scanning options in the pretty basic software... BUT if Mum has as much PC Savvy as mine? Even that level of consumer-friendly usability MIGHT still be a bit challenging! A-N-D the time to sort and clean and organise, and the HDD space needed for scans, could STILL make even THAT a challenge!.
THAT is where I would suggest you start; On a lazy Sunday afternoon, I can comfortably scan a 'new' roll of film, dress, sort and put the negs in archive; and get display copies up to Farce-Broke. I 'might' scan 3 or four films in an afternoon, from the archive. As said it is NOT a quick and easy job; you dont chuck the box of slides into the machine, press button and come back an hour later to find 150 films worth of photo's beautifully scanned and ready for up-load! That time overhead is much the same whether you go for a cheap web-cam-scanner or something more sophisticated, like a dedicated 35mm scanner. In between you have the more versatile 'transparency' compatible flat-beds, most often from Epsom, that might handle 120 roll film or even sheet, as well as 35mm, and can be 'as good' as a transport dedicated film scanner.... BUT its all time, and its all effort.
And SLIDES..... big issue there is How have they been stored?
I have very few 'mounted' slides; most of my slide films have been left unmounted, and are stored like negatives in archive binders, in tissue and cellophane sleeve pages. Tends to keep them pretty well, they dont get scratched, they are protected from dust and mold and most other enviro damage. Mounted slides, are in similar archive binders with pocketed pages for each slide... these were expensive at the time, and didn't hold as many images per page or file; hence not mounting too many.
Before Digital; I spent an Easter Holiday, when I was at uni, with a 'Slide-Duplicator-Lens that fitted on the front of my film SLR and basically let me point it at a window and take a photo of the slide, with a few rolls of cheap ASDA film & Print pre-paid colour-print film, copying all my Grandfather's slides, to print-film. Sponsored by my gran, who grumbles she had NEVER seen them, cos of the half dozen times he'd tried to set up the slide projector when every one was there to look at them, usually Christmas... the projector bulb was blown or the plug was the wrong time, or or or.... so I went through the carousels, copied them to print film, posted off the envelopes and got back snaps for her to look at.
Slides, stores in projector carousels, get dirty; EVEN if they are stored in the carousel boxes. More slides were loose, or in the boxes or envelope they came in from the lab.
NOW, dusty, sometimes moldy, often scratched; Oh-So-Much time was spent with a bowl of warm water, and cotton buds and a brand new box of mounts, trying to clean the slides before I could even begin... like I said, ts TIME and its organisation.... and if you have a bunch of slides that have just been pulled out of the attic, and every-one is 'interested' to see whats on them...... that overhead is a big one, and likely to end in Oh! I thought there was more. I thought there might be a picture of Gt Uncle Eliot in his clown suit" or whatever... you can go to an awful lot of time and trouble, to be utterly underwhelmed by what you actually find....
Like I said; IF viewing as intended with a projector, and where you find slides you will usually find one of those, or at l;east a battery viewer, so you can have a squiz at them; decide if they ARE worth doing anything with, and cherry picking the keepers. If there aren't that many to start with, that can parse out a lot of dross before you start; if there are a lot, it can still parse out a lot of dross, and bring the number of pictures REALLY worth trying to get good digi-renderings off, down to a number that is economic to get done professionally, and done well.
Idea that an Aldi web-cam-scan is 'only' £30 in this fortnights specials bullatin through the front door, and "Oh, wouldn't that be great! We could look at ALL them slides of Grandad's, we never got to look at because the bulb had blown and it was a bank holiday!".... no... no... Nooooooo.... RUN AWAY! Smile and nod! Leave them to it! It REALLY is not that easy!
A-N-D.... IF you think, "OK, well, IF its worth doing, its worth doing well...." and Mum's retired and has the time, mum has the PC savvy, and the determination, and is prepared to learn the ropes, and put in the grunt work sorting and sifting... well.. Oh-Kay... eyes open, expectations not so hugely optimistic.... what the heck... Actual scanner STILL makes not too much odds.... its a question of how much you are prepared to spend; and comparability with PC, and whether you have the HDD space for all the image files.
On that, for reference, my scanner is chucking out aprox 10Mpix full-frame scans. In Adobe PSD format, straight out of scanner, they are approx 55Mb a piece; when opened, cleaned, curves diddled, spotted out and tidied up, they more than double in file-size and are typically around 100Mb; THEN I can think about cropping them and saving as a display JPEG, which unless down-sized for web-upload are still probably around 6-7Mb.... remember, I have worked my way through around 1/4 of my own halide archive, I have around 4ooo-5ooo scans on the hard drive; that's around 50Gb of scans in the 'working' directory; This is NOT something you will fit on a lap-top with a 350Gb HDD, without it starting to grumble....
Which leads on to what you going to do with the scans? Will archive copies be kept? Will full Mega-Pixies 'masters' be kept? Will they get touched and uploaded to Farce-Broke, then deleted? Etc etc etc? A-N-D in that set of questions, back to the budget, cos will you need another HDD for the PC to store/work on them? Will you want a pocket HDD to take them round the family>? Will you want another dedicated HDD to archive them, etc etc etc.... NOW, with a 500Gb hard drive perhaps costing £80, the cost of a scanner starts to become a much smaller proportion of the all-in deal; factor in some e-bay shopping for new slide mounts so you can crack the old ones to allow good cleaning of the transparency; add in dedicated archive binders and pages to re-store them after etc etc etc...
THE SCANNER is but a small part of the entirety of the project....
Think long and hard about all THAT... THEN if its still a goer... asking what scanner to buy; with a budget in mind, with an acceptable quality level in mind, with an intended audience and means of distribution in mind....THAT will steer what sort of scanner may or may not be more or less suitable.....
BUT here and now? I'd tell my mum to forget it...... Probably get nagged till doomsday, whether I would do them all for her, but would tell her I'd add them to the queue of still not done in a decade ones, IF she really wants to wait! And she would likely STILL nag... but still... might long-lend her the Web-cam-scan to shut her up, and possibly see some embarrassing baby photos of me pop up on farce-broke, after my daughter had stayed a week-end with her and 'show her how to use it... again'... but still.... DAT be families!
Up to you, but first thing first is a PLAN, not a scan!
Best of luck!
