Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

How do?

So my Dad has always been an enthusiastic amateur photographer, and has even won the odd prize.

This of course means he has boxes upon boxes upon boxes of slides, gathered over what, three or four decades? Of course, to view them really requires a screen and a projector.

I’m aware you can buy gubbins and know-word that let you digitise the contents of those slides. And I’m looking for recommendations - I’ve found some on Amazon, but no idea if they’re actually any good!

Your suggestions please, Dakkanauts.

A long while back I looked into film scanning as I bought a medium format camera and wanted to home process the negative and then scan instead of sending stuff away - however I've never got round to doing it (I really should!)

That said at the time Espon was highly recommended to me as a quality option for home scanning. Having a quick look on Amazon the Espon Perfection range would be a good range to start looking at in terms of prices and quality of product. The Epson Perfection V550 Photo Scanner might be what I'd consider affordable for this kind of work (at least compared to paying a company to do it for you); whilst producing a good quality result.

However you could go all the way up to the £500 and £700 options. The bonus is that once you're done you should in theory, be able to sell it on secondhand and recoup some of the cost.

The very cheap (sub £100 small name brand) options I think would be good enough for home snaps, but might not be all the way up to the quality you could be after.

The other option is if you've got a good camera, nacro lens and some lighting (flash and something to diffuse it - softbox etc...) then you can do it yourself.



There are some cheap "slide holders" or you can make one yourself. In this one above I was just playing around with the idea of it and was just holding the slide with my fingers. Fine for a one off but not what you want if you're doing loads and loads

This was done with a crop sensor camera, I forget but since film is fullframe and the dimensions are different, so I likely cropped some of it away in editing. If you had a fullframe DSLR and a macro lens you could get a cheap film holder and do it that way.


Other thoughts:
1) Backup Harddrive and Cloud. Yeah if you're going to digitize the collection keep a mind to backing it up too. Cloud is nice but a spare harddrive is also good. No need for SSD fastness, regular drives are good for this

2) Photoshop Lightroom. It's on Adobes monthly subscription system now (which if you get one of the photographer bundles comes with photoshop too). I recommend getting this as it will help you greatly. It's a photo library software package that is built to help you organise large volumes of photos. In addition its also got some very good editing features built right into it. Now the Espon scanners I noted above do come with their own editing software too and that likely also has features for helping with things like spots and scratches etc... (things that are in photoshop but not in lightroom). So the Espon might do all you need with the software in the price as well, so there is that to keep in mind.

Lightroom also lets you do batch work very easily (again the Espon software might do this too I don't know); so you can process large batches at once to the same settings, which if they are scanned in or otherwise taken with the same lighting and settings and such would mean that any repeat elements should be easy to batch fix.

There are photo studios/labs that can process any slides and films for decent price without doing it by yourself.

 Freakazoitt wrote:
There are photo studios/labs that can process any slides and films for decent price without doing it by yourself.

Thing is if he's talking hundreds of slides then it would fast work out cheaper to buy even a very high end scanner and do it at home. The main thing you'd be paying for is having someone else do the actual work rather than the equipment to perform it. Of course that's not a small thing; sometimes its a lot more practical to have someone else do the labour.

I've done multiple slide digitzation projects, a fairly normal scanner, some slide trays (run about $6) and software (the epson scanner software worked fine, though we tried another package that worked slightly better - Silverfast, I believe). The software just needs the ability to treat the slides as separate objects and number them.

It lost its mystery pretty quick, the user is primarily necessary for loading and unloading the slides from the tray. Once everything is set up, it's rather automatic.

I'm using an Epson perfection for mine. Works well. I don't, however, have boxes and boxes of mounted slides.

I used to use slide film back in the film days - far better colour saturation for certain purposes.

My old HP scanner had a separate illuminated hood that could batch scan and then you could separate out (from the initial pre-scan) which ones to do the full scan of (and the software even created a folder for that batch). But the W10 update killed the driver for the lighting hood. There was a 3rd party scan software package that turned it back on, and made use of it, though.

 Overread wrote:
he main thing you'd be paying for is having someone else do the actual work rather than the equipment to perform it. Of course that's not a small thing; sometimes its a lot more practical to have someone else do the labour.

Yeah, that is my thought. You're not just paying someone to scan them, they'd also probably adjusting the colors, exposure, white balance, and so on. I could do all that myself personally in CS6, but my time is not worthless - I'd certainly rather pay someone if it was boxes and boxes and if I would not get value out of a high end scanner afterwards (I personally would not, I have a cheapo scanner that I virtually never use).

You can buy fairly cheap 35mm negative/slide scanners that feed one at a time onto an SD card but I don't know what the quality is like.

I've got an Epson flatbed flim scanner taking up space, that'll scan slide/negatives pretty well. You can have it if you cover the postage from Glasgow.

Whether you do it yourself or send them off, at least buy a lightbox first and have him decide which ones he wants digitised - you'll find he's likely got duplicates, badly framed, badly exposed and so on , so you can potentially whittle the pile of slides down significantly.