Converting slides to digital

[QRM]

Just found a load of my old photo slides, internet mentions a number of different ways of getting them converted, any recommendation of a method or a place that can do it?

[sundaymorningstaple]

I did the same thing with my old 35mm slides and negatives as well. I used a 3200 dpi Epson Perfection 3200 Photo scanner. It not a purpose built film scanner but the resolution is high enough and it was designed with both top lid mounted lighting as well as normal tube and it came with 3 sets of frames to insert either 35mm slides or film from 35mm to around 4x5 negatives as well. Unfortunately, now I have a dinosaur as I just bought a new PC that has Win7 onboard and they haven't put out new drivers for my scanner!

[x9200]

Just found a load of my old photo slides, internet mentions a number of different ways of getting them converted, any recommendation of a method or a place that can do it?

I have this one:
http://www.thepotterhouse.net/livestore ... ts_id=4405

Very good quality/price ratio. I also have Minolta DImage III 35mm dedicated film scanner and Canon performs better. You can google out some samples.
If you have a DSLR camera then a pretty reasonable solution is a slide adapter/duplicator like this:
http://cgi.ebay.com.sg/Slide-Duplicator ... ltDomain_0

For compact cameras there are also some duplicators.

If you don't want to play with this by yourself then there is a good bunch of companies proving such services. Kodak Express is one of them but there are more and more quality oriented. Another popular one with reasonable overall service quality (don't have experience with scanning though) is http://www.fotohub.com/.

[QRM]

Thanks for that, photo hub is just down the road will have a crack with them and see what the quality is like. Will report back after a few days.

[bigfilsing]

I did the same thing with my old 35mm slides and negatives as well. I used a 3200 dpi Epson Perfection 3200 Photo scanner. It not a purpose built film scanner but the resolution is high enough and it was designed with both top lid mounted lighting as well as normal tube and it came with 3 sets of frames to insert either 35mm slides or film from 35mm to around 4x5 negatives as well. Unfortunately, now I have a dinosaur as I just bought a new PC that has Win7 onboard and they haven't put out new drivers for my scanner!

XP mode is your friend

[x9200]

I did the same thing with my old 35mm slides and negatives as well. I used a 3200 dpi Epson Perfection 3200 Photo scanner. [..]Unfortunately, now I have a dinosaur as I just bought a new PC that has Win7 onboard and they haven't put out new drivers for my scanner!

Overlooked this part.
SMS, there is a nice piece of software:
http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/epson_pe ... _3200.html

It works independently of windows driver (no need). Check it out. Really good and costs peanuts.

[QRM]

Just got them back, $1.2 per slide.

Some are out of focus and each scanned image is quite small.

Trouble is I have nothing to compare it with, I might try a few more shot at another joint and compare.

[sundaymorningstaple]

I did the same thing with my old 35mm slides and negatives as well. I used a 3200 dpi Epson Perfection 3200 Photo scanner. [..]Unfortunately, now I have a dinosaur as I just bought a new PC that has Win7 onboard and they haven't put out new drivers for my scanner!

Overlooked this part.
SMS, there is a nice piece of software:
http://www.hamrick.com/vuescan/epson_pe ... _3200.html

It works independently of windows driver (no need). Check it out. Really good and costs peanuts.

Whoa! You just made my whole day! Thanks a bunch!

bigfilsing,

XP mode lets it only work like a generic scanner, cannot do scans of negs/slides.

[x9200]

Just got them back, $1.2 per slide.

Some are out of focus and each scanned image is quite small.

Trouble is I have nothing to compare it with, I might try a few more shot at another joint and compare.

This is what I got from Kodak Express in 2002. It's from a negative, the positive (slides) should be of better quality.

http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/1360/0202n30.jpg
http://img193.imageshack.us/img193/7637/0202k18.jpg

It is on the edge of acceptance so if you got anything worse from correctly exposed and developed slides you should probably request them to redo it.

[x9200]

Whoa! You just made my whole day! Thanks a bunch!

Glad to hear it I used it under Linux until I bought the mentioned Canon which has an IR scratch removal function. Unfortunately they did not include support for it with the Linux version