Scanner for old slides- Recommendations?

[flyfish29]

I have about 100 sleeves of old family slides that I need to archive into my Mac so I can make a DVD slide show for the fam!

I searched the forums and didn't find many recommendations)

Can you recommend a good scanner that is easy to import the photos into iPhoto so I can do this project? I don't need the very best (less than $300), but want a pretty good one that is easy to use has built in support for scanning slides and works well with OSX. I also need this scanner to play nice with my Teacher's new Dell laptops at my school.

Thanks!

 

[Keebler]

bring to a shop

Hi Flyfish,

I offer slides onto DVD as a business. I bring my slides to a photo lab/store/shop. They have the professional scanners which make the process automatic and eliminate the need to learn new hardware/software. Plus, I have an older HP scanner which seemed to scan the images nicely, but the results from the pro machine were of course, much better.

They can scan up to 2000 x 3000, at least the one i use does, which is great for blow ups. You can then resize for DVD slideshow work. Kills 2 birds with 1 stone as you'll receive a CD of the images to print. a great idea to share the pics with the family, as well as the DVD.

hope that helps.

Cheers,
keebler

PS. the cost shouldn't be more than $1 per slide. I think my cost is $0.60 per.

 

[rjphoto]

We have a couple of HP flat bed scanners that have a 35mm slide/film holder in the lid with a back light. I've used it a few times and it works pretty good for a scanner. They are across campus so I can't give you model numbers right now.

I haven't used it with a Mac yet and it takes a few minutes for each slide.

Now for OLD SCHOOL MEETS NEW SCHOOL:

I'm trying to get something like this going as a service to the Doctors I work with.
I have dusted off my old 35mm slide copier and slapped on a Nikon D70 in place of the old Nikon F2 (and F3). Back in the 80's I used this antique to make Dupe slides for physician lectures. It's well over 25 years old but the Nikon D70 still has the same lens mount as a Nikon F2. It takes about 10 seconds a slide. A little PhotoShop tweek and all's good. I get 2000x3000 resolution (or more with a D200...) and can shoot a full tray of slides in 20 minutes.

Oh, and I would be willing to offer my services.

PM me if you're interested.

 

[Macky-Mac]

I have about 100 sleeves of old family slides .....!

wow, that's a LOT of slides! These are the type of sleeves that hold 20 slides each? So there might be as many as 2000 slides?? You could be scanning for a LONG time, a LONG LONG time!!

I've been using a canon 8400F which will scan slides and I've been happy with it.

 

[ChrisA]

I have about 100 sleeves of old family slides that I need to archive into my Mac so I can make a DVD slide show for the fam!

I searched the forums and didn't find many recommendations)

Can you recommend a good scanner that is easy to import the photos into iPhoto so I can do this project? I don't need the very best (less than $300), but want a pretty good one that is easy to use has built in support for scanning slides and works well with OSX. I also need this scanner to play nice with my Teacher's new Dell laptops at my school.

Thanks!

I just bought one. The Epson 4990 would be ideal for you but it's over your $300 budget. The one I bought is almost as good and is under $300. I got the 4870 It's the model that the 4990 replaced and Epson sells refurbished units for about $200. If you could afford the 4990 then you could load in larger batches of slides and get on with the job faster but image quality is about the same

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/Store/consumer/consDetail.jsp?BV_UseBVCookie=yes&oid=49679245

One feature you want is "Digital ICE" This is a technology developed by Kodak and licensed to the various scanner makers like Epson, Canon and so on. It works well and really does fix defects on the slides. The 4870 has both Firewire and USB2 and is fast but the ICE processing on my 1.2Ghz G4 is very slow butfaster then me having to go in with the "clone" tool in Photoshop and bust dust by hand.

 

[Le Big Mac]

wow, that's a LOT of slides! These are the type of sleeves that hold 20 slides each? So there might be as many as 2000 slides?? You could be scanning for a LONG time, a LONG LONG time!!

If they're all old slides, I'd go with outsourcing. Instead of getting them all scanned, though, buy a small slide viewer and pick out the 100-200 you want for the slide show, and pay for them to be scanned.

Unless you continue to take slides, it seems like you'll pay more by buying a scanner.

 

[flyfish29]

wow, that's a LOT of slides! These are the type of sleeves that hold 20 slides each? So there might be as many as 2000 slides?? You could be scanning for a LONG time, a LONG LONG time!!

I've been using a canon 8400F which will scan slides and I've been happy with it.

thanks for all the replies so far- I forgot to say that I won't be scanning all the slides- probalby 500 or so. I have to take out the bad ones, ones of things or people we have no idea who it is, etc. I am not going to spend too much time working on lighting, etc obviously with so many slides.

So does the 4870 scan directly into iPhoto or does it have it's own software that you need to scan it in at and then import into iPhoto?

 

[bousozoku]

Minolta Dual Scan [insert a number here] film scanner for $299. I've not used it for slides but it works for positive or negative film and works quite well, 6 at a time.

You'll get better accuracy than you can get with a flat bed because it's not made for large pieces of paper.

 

[Macky-Mac]

...So does the 4870 scan directly into iPhoto or does it have it's own software that you need to scan it in at and then import into iPhoto?

From long habit I do all of my scanning through photoshop. There is a stand alone scanning module that comes with the scanner as I remember but i've never used it.

Is it even possible to scan directly into iphoto? I've got iphoto 5 and according to "iphoto help" it looks like you have to scan the photos to your HD and then import them into iphoto....it doesn't look like any scanner will scan directly into iphoto from what iphoto help says, unless that's a feature that was added to iphoto 6

 

[flyfish29]

From long habit I do all of my scanning through photoshop. There is a stand alone scanning module that comes with the scanner as I remember but i've never used it.

Is it even possible to scan directly into iphoto? I've got iphoto 5 and according to "iphoto help" it looks like you have to scan the photos to your HD and then import them into iphoto....it doesn't look like any scanner will scan directly into iphoto from what iphoto help says, unless that's a feature that was added to iphoto 6

Thanks for your help- yeah, I don't even know if you can scan directly? I don't have 6 so I don't know, but probably not now that I think about it. I will just scan them into some folders and then import them.

I just knew that for a while with OSX you had to have photoshop to import directly into OSX, or else they had to be scanned into OS9 with software...but that was ages ago obviously.