Digitising slides, any ideas?

[daggerfan]

Hello all,

I have a few thousand slides that I've been meaning to make digital copies of for a few years now, and having recently found some of them under attack from mould the sooner I start the better.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to faff about with a reasonably high-end film scanner. I'm not looking for perfection, just acceptably good copies that I can view either on a 10-inch tablet or a large-screen television.

I tried a Polaroid slide copier that I bought off Amazon for around £30 which is basically a metal tube with a slide carrier at one end and the other end screws onto the front of a camera lens. The unit has a close-up lens in it which gives severe colour fringeing at the edges, so not really the way to go, but what do you expect for the low price!

With that in mind I was thinking of either using a DSLR, macro lens and lightbox to copy the slides, or perhaps using a small film scanner along the lines of the Kenro KNSC201, which, as well as being able to connect to a computer, can also be used as a stand-alone unit that saves scanned jpegs (4416x3312 pixels) to an SD card. This particular scanner retails for around £95.

Has anyone tried one of these small scanners, or does anyone have any opinions on either of the methods I have in mind?

[dollar99]

When I first decided to scan my slides I tried out one of the cheap scanners. Quality was OK but I hit a snag with different thickness of slide mounts cutting off noses and tails. I ended up with a reasonable price scanner but I do have the time to spend trying for a reasonable result.

Having said that I noticed recently that the spec of the newer "cheap" scanners seems to have gone up several notches. Whether this means they now cope better than the one I tried I don't know. Usually worth picking a couple and Googling to see if there are any reputable reviews.

It takes me about 5 minutes to get from the slide to an edited version like this one, but only you can decide if it's worth spending the time.

rhino11_a7d_69222_2_mildenhall by Ian Powell, on Flickr

This is using a Plustek 7600i scanner with VueScan and Paintshop Pro software.

[daggerfan]

Thanks for that. Nice A-7 by the way!

Yes, it was the apparent increase in quality of these mini scanners that had me thinking of giving one a try. But the one thing I couldn't see in the specs is how long it takes to scan each slide.

I have an Epson V300 flatbed scanner but I found the scanning process rather time-consuming and the results a bit hit and miss.

I think my main priority is to get my slides saved to digital format as quickly as possible, then I can take a little bit of time playing about with them in Photoshop Elements. With that in mind I thought the DSLR/macro lens/lightbox set-up would be the quickest method, but I guess there must be downsides to that or everyone would be doing it.

In my day job I spent all my time in front of a computer so the last thing I wanted to do was sit in front of one at home. Having now taken early retirement I am still reluctant to spent too much time staring into a screen, hence the search for acceptable quality rather than perfection.

[PR9]

By the "cheap" ones do you mean the 5mp ones that are essentially a small camera with some LED bulbs?

I had one a few years ago which was OK for negatives but awful for slides, either being too dark or bleaching out all details.

The "SLUF" pic looks like it's been done with a good scanner.

[dollar99]

I believe the scanners you are looking at are far quicker than dedicated scanners.

As to sitting in front of the computer, I have been scanning slides for years but only after losing a good mate and trying to scan part of his collection did I seriously sit down to scan mine from A-Z. I set myself a goal of trying to average 12 a day. This just happened to coincide with the wife's TV programmes Last year I managed an average of just over 15, so just about 5,500 in the year and am on schedule to exceed that this year. It makes it a far more manageable task and with the quality of the scan I can store them as a "digital negative" so the ones that are less than perfect can be re-edited in the future if I choose. Also I have found the more I do the easier it becomes, you can judge the settings you need to scan far more quickly and so I can usually scan one while editing the previous one cutting the time down.

Everything though is a compromise, but the better the scan the better your finished image will be.

[tspark95]

I have used a slide scanner in the past and find it very slow, So what i use now is a small led light box and tape a cardboard mask with the slide size cutout in the middle. I use my camera on a tripod looking down at the light box. I do use an extension tube on my lens, connect the camera to my pc.Once you have it in focus, pop a slide onto the lightbox locating it in the cutout and pressing the spacebar on my computer captures the image. I find i can capture alot quicker this way,then using a photo editor i can crop and sharpen etc.

[daggerfan]

Thanks for that.

Yes, your preferred method certainly seems the way to go as regards speed of capture. I certainly found my flatbed scanner rather slow and tedious to use.

[sploosher]

If you fancy letting someone else have the `joy` of cleaning and scanning your slides, then try here...............

https://piciscan.co.uk/slide-scanning-service

they did some medium format ones for me a while ago, and they came out superb...........

they do what they call `rapid scanning` for up to 2000 slides at 18p each

take a look here................

https://www.flickr.com/photos/35699306@ ... 4283422625

you may notice that they did some `non aviation` ones for me too.............

[Taxboy]

I was also going to suggest sending them off for scanning. It depends how much your time is worth to you. If it takes you 1 minute on average to capture that's about 2 solid days sitting in front of a computer per 1000 slides. Even if you just did 1 hour a day that's over 2 weeks worth, plus will you still have the enthusiasm after a few days ?

Can I suggest you pick your better images and send those off

Sent from my XT1032 using Tapatalk

[ChrisCwmbran]

If you look on eBay you'll find dedicated slide scanners like the Nikon Coolscan at reasonable prices second hand:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Nikon-CoolSca ... 2299732124

I know a couple of people who have purchased a package like that - some times quite a lot cheaper - scanned their collection and then resold the scanner and got pretty much all if not all their money back.

Perhaps worth a thought?

[daggerfan]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

Sending my slides off for scanning is a no-no. Many years ago I sent slides off (can't remember where) to have copy slides made and when I got them back some of the originals were scratched. So these days I wouldn't let them out of the house.

A secondhand Nikon Coolscan or similar mid/high end film scanner is too time-consuming for the kind of copies I'm looking for. As I said earlier, I'm not looking for perfection, just acceptable copies for viewing.

I will try the DSLR/macro lens/lightbox method first, then assess the results to see where I go from there.

[CookipediaChef]

A few years back I scanned literally 1000's of old, mainly black & white, odd sized negatives using an Epson 4990 Photo.

The fastest way for me was to ignore the negative holders completely, they were thrown out almost immediately.

I lay as many negatives on the scanner bed as will fit in one go. Scan once and make as many copies of the scan img as there were negatives scanned, then one by one process each scan, cutting, rotating, adjusting and saving. Rinse and repeat.

It was time consuming, but allowed you to quickly disregard unusable pictures without wasting time on scanning individually. The results were phenomenal, though I did have the benefit of Photoshop.