Recommendations for 35mm slides to digital?

Posted June 23rd, 2008 by stevebert

Graphics, graphics, graphics

I have a pre-digital-era picture collection consisting mostly of 35mm slides shot from Fuji Velvia stock. I would like to pull some or all or these photos into digital format for iPhoto, Photoshop, etc. I'm looking for advice on the best way to digitally preserve these photos, which represent treasured memories. I've had experience some years back with a Nikon slide scanner (SCSI, no less) and found the procedure to be slow and very finicky, especially with regard to color matching. I eventually gave up and opted for the expense of Kodak PhotoCD when processing the slides, but I don't believe that service is available any longer(?). The slides are fairly high quality images from past trips to Europe, and I would like to maintain the color balance and image quality in the transfer. Since this would be a one-off process (I only shoot digital these days), I'm searching for a transfer method with the least hassle, lowest cost and best fidelity to the originals. Given my past experience with slide scanning, I'm considering taking the slides to a professional conversion house – the kind that does wedding DVDs from video, etc – but I have potentially 100s of slides to archive and I don't think these services are especially cheap. So I'm willing to re-consider a slide scanner if I can find one for less than $one-arm-and-one-leg that works well with Mac OS X.

If anyone has any recommendations or experience with this, I would love to hear from you, either directly or through the forum.

Thanks,
-- steve
stevebert@mac.com

Here is what the Your Mac

On June 25th, 2008 Shawn says:

Here is what the Your Mac Life Mailing List came up with:

From Philip Booth:
I only know about the Nikon Cool Pix Slide scanners and most folks say there are good. But that is a lot of work. Check out labs (Even Ritzcamera) in your area to see what it would cost to have it done.

From Charlie Brown:
Here's a link to a review of a scanning service called ScanCafe posted on photo website:

http://twipphoto.com/index.php/archives/323

I also happen to know someone who has used this service with good results. I'm considering using this service my self since I have tons of slides that I'd like to digitalize. I have a Canon CanoScan 8800F that does a good job scanning slides four at a time. The scanning itself is not such a problem although it is time consuming but what I found was that the critical part of a good scan of a slide is cleaning the slide. Dirt on slides shows up to a much greater degree that on scans of pictures or documents. Cleaning slides is very tedious and almost never perfect. Aunt Hortence always has a big glob of schmutz on her forehead.;)

--
Shawn King
Host/Executive Producer
Your Mac Life
http://www.yourmaclifeshow.com