Thoughts on Scanners for slides/negatives?

Not sure if this is a topic for this board, but you all have such amazing information to share I thought I'd give it a try.

I need/want a scanner that will scan mounted slides, the ones in the card board frames, as well as 35mm negatives? My parents have at least 30 carousel trays of slides, and no way to view them!


Have any of you used any of these kind of scanners? I am currently looking at the Canon CanoScan 8800F....any thoughts there?

Thanks so much for you input! I have learned so much from you all from this board!

Happy New Year!

I'd be curious too.

I have many, many slides left from my film days. I'm not sure about purchasing a slide/film scanner as it would be a "use once, then get rid of it" situation. Are there any good services or shops that can do this? There used to be a place here in Indianapolis called Firehouse, but the last I heard, they quit the consumer side of the business...

There are services that will convert them to digial photos on a CD (or DVD) for less than 25c a piece. If you take into account how long it would take you to scan the slides these services make a lot of sense.

I'm interested too...actually went into Vistek to buy a Canon, and the salesperson tried to talk me into an Epson.
So I'm undecided. Confused.

I have the same issues with slide copying; and I don't want to ship them out of my country. I'm afraid of losing possession of them.

Nikon sells an attachment to use with the 60 mm micro lens to allow users to make digital copies of slides. I don't know whether quality is better or worse than using a specific flat bed scanner.

(I'm a N---- user. Sh!!!)

I just purchased a Canoscan 9000F from B&H for $174 last month - I'm very impressed with it so far - much better than my old H-P scanners and supposedly not as tedious to use as the Epson versions. I may upgrade to Silverfast software in the future but the Canon software that came with the scanner is pretty good.

I have a rig that mounts slides in front of my macro lens too - good for quick screen shot quality pictures but not as good as the scanner will do.

I use a Nikon V ED that generates superb files (Approx 48Mb)

Fortunately my percentage of keepers when I shot film wasn't Earth shaking so the number of scan-worthy images is more or less manageable.

FlyingPhotog wrote in post #11545034
I use a Nikon V ED that generates superb files (Approx 48Mb)

Fortunately my percentage of keepers when I shot film wasn't Earth shaking so the number of scan-worthy images is more or less manageable.

Same here. I'm guessing I have maybe 1,500 slides and I'll probably want to scan only 5% of them.

I would want "excellent" scans, so maybe I can rent a good dedicated scanner somewhere?

P.S. I checked out that Nikon scanner. Nice, but the price... Nah.

If you have a lot of scanning to do you will find it very time consuming. Consider using ScanCafe. Ship everything to them and let them do the work for you. I thought the pricing was very reasonable. I recently gave them a test run and was very satisfied and will be sending them more. I have a scanner but will only be using it for small projects.

The lens attachments for copying mounted slides using a camera have one super significant assumption: that you are copying 24x36mm slides onto 24x36mm film/sensor...1:1 reproduction

If you are copying 24x36mm slides onto a 15x22mm APS-C frame, the 1:1 size assumption is USELESS!!! These devices WILL NOT WORK with APS-C cameras to accomplish the desired goal. You will end up copying a 15x22mm section of the 24x36mm slide onto the APS-C size sensor.

Scanning is time consuming not only for scan time (which is not all that great, if one pass of a flatbed scanner scans 8 slides at once) but the fact that you need to meticulously clean the slides to remove dust! If you have a large volume of slides, I think that the only way to go is to find a commercial service rather than drive yourself nuts with dust avoidance.

Thanks karrerra.
I found a contact nearby who showed me the results using:
* flatbed scanner
* copy with micro lens
and the dynamic range was better with the scanner.
I think the real time saving is in weeding out the bad ones; same issue as flying photog. Maybe worse--than him--I wasn't as good as I thought I was.

Appreciate the comment made about the Canon 9000. It was the one I set out to buy; Vistek rep must have ties with Epson.

Best,

My Dad had a flatbed scanner capable of scanning slides. Sorry, I can't remember the name or model now, but it wasn't super-expensive or anything. I tried some slides as a test and wasn't exactly overwhelmed with the quality.

I'm not willing to pay big bucks for a dedicated slide scanner because I'll basically use it once. I'm guessing I'll only have maybe 100 slides max that I want to keep, so I'd be OK with paying for a good scanning service.

I use film 95% of the time and when I want to scan I use my trusty old Konica-Minolta Scan Dual IV, discontinued years ago. Now that Nikon is also discontinuing its scanners, the buzz in the film community is around the Plustek 7600i, manufactured by a company that seems to be in it for the long haul. It gets good reviews and is reasonable in price; just enter the product name and the word "review" into Google and you can read all about it. It comes with holders for both negs and slides.

Thanks Peter. I'll go take a look.

I've got the Plustek 7600i and I'm using it with Hamrick's Vuescan software. Seems a nice enough package. My father's using it at the moment on some of his 60+ year backlog.

I bought a an Epson Perfection a few years ago just for that and it works great. My new toy is a 4x6 photo scanner. Since I can't find the negatives, I an trying that method.